


Patient John N

by kakawot



Category: Naruto, Scrubs
Genre: Crossover, Dimension Travel, Gen, Hospitalization
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-12
Updated: 2014-01-13
Packaged: 2018-01-04 11:38:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1080578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kakawot/pseuds/kakawot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A boy with red eyes gets rushed to Sacred Heart, Kurama gets to make a cross-country trip and Naruto has no idea why everybody keeps talking in a strange language. It's almost as if he'd gotten transported to a whole other world...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for up to manga chapter 627.
> 
> I’m a fan of unlikely crossovers, so I hope you enjoy my contribution to this genre. Please keep in mind that I’m ESL, so please notify me if you come across anything weird. I’ve researched this fic to the best of my abilities, but I claim artistic license on the effects of chakra on modern medicine. This fic is finished and about 25.000 words long. I’ve cut it up into five chapters and will be posting them on Mondays.
> 
> Also, I began writing this when chapter 627 came out, so I’m going on information given up to that chapter. Any new developments, characters or attacks introduced after that chapter won’t show up in here.
> 
> Enjoy!

The boy's eyes were red, he noticed in the tiny window of time before the John Doe patient went absolutely berserk. IV tubes dragged behind the boy as he shot out of bed, making a sound not unlike an angry dog. The next second JD dodged a lamp, a vase and a pen which got thrown so hard it embedded itself in the drywall. The aim was terribly off, though, all three items coming to a forceful stop against the wall four feet to JD's right side. The shards still flew around, ripping through the sleeve of his scrubs and a jab in his leg told of the shard now cemented there.  
  
“Calm down, kid!” JD yelled, sidestepping the medical clipboard flung his way. “I'm not here to hurt you!”  
  
The growling continued, although the barrage of items stopped. Must have run out of ammunition. Had the ambulance picked up a feral child? The call said that the boy had appeared in the countryside, but he wore clothes when he arrived, JD knew. That much orange wouldn't escape anybody's notice.  
  
“Are you done throwing things? I can come back later,” he said in a light tone. Dr. Cox would be on his ass though, the minute he walked out the door and didn't have an answer as to how the John Doe patient was doing. So he stood his ground although the trickle of blood from the shard in his legs began to soak through his scrubs.  
  
Carefully JD took a few steps towards to check if the boy hadn't fallen unconscious again behind the bed. And then there was the tangle of IV tubes to sort out. Great.  
  
The growling made place for a voice, talking in a language JD had never heard before. Double great. The voice sounded wrong. Too low, growly, for a boy. It sounded like his vocal cords had skipped puberty and dove straight into the gruff tones of an 80 year old smoker, although with the volume of a boat horn and none of the wheezy quality.  
  
“Hey kid, can you understand me?” JD asked. The boy answered something which JD didn't need to be fluent in to recognize as an expletive. “So that's a 'no',” JD said. He took a few more steps and could now spot the kid.  
  
With the blood and grime washed off the young face the boy was very, very blond. A big mop of hair, sticking out every which way even despite flatness the pillow introduced to the bed head. The paleness of his face could be contributed to the extensive surgery needed to fix the kid's shoulder and life threatening hole in his stomach. JD expected him to pass out, actually, because that sort of activity after surgery was usually too much to handle. He hoped that the kid hadn't ripped out any sutures.  
  
But defiant red eyes stared right back at him, arms curled around the stomach but the boy's whole body tensed up. That had to hurt the cracked ribs, not even the hefty amount of drugs the boy was on would be enough to suppress the pain, JD knew. But the impossibly red eyes looked clear.  
  
JD knelt on the ground, laying the clipboard aside in order to calm the kid down.  
  
“Hey, listen up,” he began. “I don't know if you can understand me, but you're in a hospital. We found you by the side of a road, no ID, no idea where you're from. We're the ones who fixed you up and want to get you home to your family, but first I need to get you back in bed. Otherwise the stitches might rip, and you'll be a lot more uncomfortable.”  
  
There came no response from the boy, only a narrowing of the eyes. Very well, back to the basics of any language. JD pointed at himself.  
  
“Doctor Dorian,” he said. “Or John Dorian, or JD to friends. But you're a patient, so it's best if you call me doctor Dorian. Or maybe Dorian, if you don't know what 'doctor' means.”  
  
That got him a snarl. JD spotted a new wound on the boy's fist where an IV hung loose and blood dripped down his hand.  
  
“Dorian,” JD tried again. He gestured towards the boy in the universal 'and now you' motion. The boy shook his head. His eyes slammed shut and he curled in on himself, making a high-pitched noise in the back of his throat. He listed sideways and JD shot forward to catch him but at the last second the boy's hand shot out and he steadied himself.  
  
“Easy, easy,” JD said, kneeling next to him in case his consciousness did choose to flee. The boy looked up, but this time the eyes were light blue. He blinked a few times and then let loose a choice of words that weren't nice, JD guessed. The voice had changed as well, much more fitting with his posture. Pain lines erupted in his face and he covered the wound on his hand with his other hand as if gauging for the first time how serious it was, instead of ignoring it in favor of growling.  
  
“Let me see that,” JD said, slowly taking the hand, snapping on his gloves before he touched blood. The sudden sound startled the kid, prompting a new wince as he covered the bandages around his stomach with his free hand.  
  
“Still no English, right? Spanish then? Habla inglés? Let's see... Elliot taught me this... German? Sprechen sie Deutsch?” But there cane no verbal response from the boy as JD examined the bloody hand. The damage looked superficial, although he would have to put in a new IV.  
  
“Naruto,” the boy carefully enunciated, pointing at himself. JD took that as his cue to repeat his introduction.  
  
“Do- doran,” the boy repeated. Good enough, JD thought to himself.  
  
“Come one, Naruto, let's get you into bed again,” JD said, pushing the button to summon a nurse to help him untangle the wires and get the boy back into bed without stretching his sutures even further.  
  
And thus the mystery of the boy with the red eyes was born.  
  
XXX  
  
The smell of dirt was overwhelming and fresh. It assaulted his senses and it took him a long moment before he realized why that was. He hadn't smelled something with his own, physical nose in over sixteen years.  
  
More sensations came to him, worming their way into his brain one by one. His left paw hurt, the right side of his face was cold and somehow this took long to process, his mind felt distant. The smell of earth overpowered pretty much everything else for the moment, so he was content to lay there and revel in the sensations of his own body.  
  
After a while the numbness of his face and the pain in his paw took over and for the first time he opened his eyes. Well, his left eye.  
  
The sky was blue. Wasn't that a surprise. The blue in the sky told him that it was around noon, with clouds forming which predicted rain later in the afternoon or perhaps in the evening. He lifted his head and realized that something was horribly wrong. The earth was much too close to him, the grass was tall, the shrubbery looked huge. The only time he remembered looking at things from this height was when Naruto stood for the first time.  
  
He felt tiny.  
  
With some trouble he gathered his paws underneath him and raised to full height, which was still damn small. He should be towering over the trees, not hiding in their shadows. Something had gone terribly wrong during the fight with Obito. A quick look around confirmed that Naruto was nowhere to be found. He stood in an empty field, recently plowed but otherwise bare. He saw a tree line in the distance and birds called enthusiastically to each other from somewhere up above.  
  
Definitely not the battlefield, then. That had been plowed as well, but in a different sense of the word. Fighting with that octopus, Madara himself and of course the ten-tailed demon would do that to the surroundings.  
  
And now Kurama was tiny, Naruto was gone and the chakra coils inside this frail body were pretty much empty. This was going to be fantastic.  
  
XXX  
  
JD rose from his lean on the counter of the nurse station when the woman approached. She looked cute, he wondered why he hadn't noticed her before. He walked every hallway, after all, and a brunette with that figure would sure attract his attention, unless she had... Yep, a wedding ring adorned her hand. So that tiny opportunity flew out the window. Oh well, as long as she could help with the red-eyed kid.  
  
“You must be Ms. Carthagan,” JD said, sticking out his hand. “Dr. Dorian,” he introduced. Her grip was firmer than it should be, as if she thought she proved something by squashing his hand.  
  
“I understood that you had trouble placing the language of a John Doe,” Ms. Carthagan said. JD nodded and led the way to the patient's room while updating her on his status. When they entered the kid sat up from his slump, his lidded eyes snapping open. They were still blue, JD noted, with no sign of the red from before.  
  
“Doran,” Naruto said by way of greeting. He looked wary, arm tucked around his stomach to ward off any poking or prodding.  
  
“Naruto, Ms. Carthagan. Ms. Carthagan, Naruto,” JD said, gesturing from one to the other. They both nodded at each other, the smile on Ms. Carthagan's face reaching all the way to her hazel eyes.  
  
“So you already tried Spanish and German, right?” Ms. Carthagan ascertained. She grabbed a chair and settled down next to Naruto, who scooted a bit to the right to get away from her.  
“Naruto?” At the mention of his name, he looked at the woman. “I'm Ms. Carthagan,” she said, pointing at herself. “I'm here to help you.” She used obvious gestures to support her message.  
  
Naruto answered something, the confusion apparent in his voice. Ms. Carthagan cocked her head. “Sounds like an Asian language...”  
  
“He doesn't look Asian,” JD couldn't help but remark, realizing a second too late that that might be racist. “I mean, he could be, but I guess.... You know what, I'm going to say nothing.”  
  
His ramble went ignored by Naruto and Ms. Carthagan as Ms. Carthagan asked things in various languages. JD didn't like the way Naruto shook his head at every language the woman tried. But there was one he perked up at. Ms. Carthagan repeated that and Naruto answered with a torrent of words, gesturing wildly and pointing outside. His tirade lasted for about a minute before he concluded with a word even JD understood: sensei.  
  
“So he's from Japan,” JD concluded.  
  
“Yes,” Ms. Carthagan said as she rose from her seat. “I've got a contact at Seattle Grace Hospital who speaks Japanese, I'll get in touch with him.”  
  
“Thank you!” JD said. He could finally explain the situation to the kid and get on his way to finding the parents or other family so the kid wouldn't be so alone.  
  
XXX  
  
It had been a long time since Kurama was left to his own devices. He had been manipulated for at least a hundred years now, swinging from slave to Uchiha Madara to being sealed inside Naruto. The last bout of freedom was sixteen years ago, when he had laid waste to half of Konoha, but even that was accomplished under the influence of the sharingan.  
  
The sudden freedom would have been welcome if he hadn't been so small and weak, though. If he still possessed the mighty body he was used to he would truly enjoy smelling the scent of rain on grass, but as it was, he felt miserable.  
  
The rain was unrelenting and the bush he took shelter under didn't keep the rain out for long. He had found a road. At first it was a dirt road but soon it turned into a black road with white markings. Vehicles of all colors used this road to travel and Kurama had almost been hit twice already as he crossed it. Buildings appeared here and there, although they were small and seemed to be mainly used to provide the vehicles with fuel.  
  
The pain in his left paw had disappeared as Kurama walked alongside the road at a safe distance. His chakra coils were still empty, though, and the need to rest and feed made itself known. His loping jog was efficient but the steps he took were so small. If he had his old body he'd be halfway to Suna from Konoha by now, but going by the numbers on the signs he had traveled ten kilometers.  
  
His senses were as sharp as ever, and he knew that he wasn't supposed to be here. The buildings felt wrong, the roads looked wrong and that many metallic vehicles meant one thing: they were far from the world they were familiar with.  
  
Damn that Madara, Kakashi and their space-time ninjutsu! Those sharingan eyes meant nothing but trouble for Kurama. He wanted to rip out every one of those red pupils and squash them underneath his paw. The great nine-tailed demon got reduced to eating dead fowl on the side of the road. It tasted tarry and horrible, but it sustained him for now, until he could get to Naruto and get this all sorted out.  
  
He wasn't keen on returning to the kid like a dog playing fetch, but at least that shinobi was somewhat trustworthy. And maybe the only shinobi in the vicinity, and the empty chakra coils begged to be filled. Naruto had plenty of chakra on his own, he could spare some.  
  
After all, Naruto no longer could claim 'rent' from Kurama for living inside his body. Now he had to find the boy, but his instincts were sharp and his mind was clear. The boy would be found.  
  
XXX  
  
The pain was back at half-force, the drugs coursing through his system keeping the worst of it at bay. Naruto didn't like the hazy feeling he got from them, but even his trained body couldn't endure the jagged rips his belly sent up. Not when there was a morphine button which sent it all away. He tried not to hit it often, but eventually his weak body made him reach for it.  
  
He slept a lot, only being woken by either a nurse checking in on him or that Doran guy. The woman who spoke three words of his language hadn't returned yet, so Naruto was stuck using primitive sign language to signal what he wanted.  
  
When he was awake his world shrunk to the morphine button, trying to eat something and enduring the pain in his body. He had no idea how long he existed in this state of mind, he barely knew if it was night or day. But he did recover, bit by bit. Nowhere near as fast as he was used to, and something niggled at his mind, but the drugs neatly kept those niggles away from his conscious mind, filed away to think about later.  
  
But his gut instinct told him that something was very wrong.  
  
XXX  
  
JD checked in on Naruto. The interpreter had visited two days ago, but claimed that the boy didn't speak Japanese. There were some similarities, but the vocabulary and pronunciation were too different. Even the characters Naruto wrote down differed from Japanese in a way the interpreter couldn’t read them. The interpreter claimed that he knew someone who specialized in regional accents. He got a sound bite from the boy and sent it off. JD had yet to hear the result of that analysis.  
  
There was a solution to the language barrier, for the moment. In case someone couldn't speak or write, they used cards with pictographs to make at least some basic wishes known. Naruto caught on quick and used them to communicate.  
  
Bright blue eyes looked back at him and JD stepped inside, clipboard in hand. It was time to change the dressing on his wound, his clipboard said. Not the most pleasant of tasks for either of them, but it was necessary. Naruto was still jittery around him, something which grated against his pride as a doctor people confided in. His bedside manner was good, he knew that, but still the kid jumped whenever JD touched him.  
  
Changing the dressing was more of a nursing duty, but he didn't want to confront the no doubt frightened kid with too many strange faces. So JD had nicked the clipboard from Carla and ran off. He would pay for that later, he knew, but for the moment it was worth it.  
  
“Hey Naruto, you doing okay?” JD asked. He knew that Naruto couldn't understand him, but Naruto answered to the questioning tone with words in his own language.  
  
JD peeled off the bandages and inspected the wound. The strange tattoo centered around Naruto's navel was huge and had been a bit of a shock to the surgeon. The sutures created a new line right through the center of the tattoo.  
  
“It looks like he has been ripped open,” the surgeon had commented, Turk told JD later on. JD agreed with that sentiment. Like a fire hose had been turned on from the inside of his stomach, water which spread every which way, spraying the floor until he stood ankle deep in water, a dripping sound coming from his left. His mind drifted away from the patient’s room.  
  
JD recognized it as one of his daydreams and he tried to rip himself out of it. Daydreaming while actively dealing with a patient would earn him some much more insulting nicknames from Dr. Cox than regular girl names.  
  
But he found he couldn't.  
  
The walls were shrouded in darkness, the water looked greenish but clear and giant bars crossed the middle of the room. A human figure stood in the room as well. The blond hair gave the human away as Naruto, although he was dressed differently. He wore the clothes he had on the day he arrived at the hospital, the orange sticking out in this place like a cat at a dog fair.  
  
“Hey!” JD yelled, waving his arms at Naruto. The boy turned around. Something was wrapped around his head, glinting in the light which had no discernible source.  
  
“Kurama's gone,” Naruto said, and this time JD could understand him somehow. He at least understood the puzzled tone.  
  
“Who's Kurama?” JD asked. “And what's up with this place?”  
  
The dripping sound continued, as well as the soft sloshing of a giant body of water. The bars in the middle of the room were immense, stretching from the floor and disappearing into the distant ceiling, also shrouded in darkness. But there had to be a ceiling, otherwise this room made absolutely no sense. This exercise of the imagination felt different from his usual daydreams.  
  
“There's supposed to be a giant nine-tailed demon fox in that cage! Maybe not in that cage anymore,” Naruto amended, “but he has to be here!” His voice raised in alarm and he gestured wildly at the bars of what JD now recognized as a cage. His mind sure could come up with some weird stuff, he knew that, but this was a new one for him.  
  
“Kurama's gone and now he's out there, smashing villages and killing people and, and, I have to find him!”  
  
JD blinked and found himself back in the hospital room, joined by a wildly thrashing Naruto. JD called for a nurse as he tried to hold the boy down, but the kid was strong. The weird daydream got shoved onto a back-burner for a while as his mind raced for a medical cause for Naruto's sudden fit. Allergies to a certain medicine?  
  
The yells and no doubt threats that poured forth from Naruto's mouth assured him that the kid didn't slip into shock. A murse, no, JD stopped that thought, a male nurse joined him in making sure that the boy didn't rip any more sutures and bled to death underneath his hands. That would be just his luck.  
  
After a minute Naruto calmed down and stopped yelling and trying to jump out of the window to look for this Kurama guy. He slumped into the bedding, exhaustion apparent in his eyes.  
  
What was up with that daydream, though? A cage, demons, Naruto talking English, it all made no sense.  
  
The mystery of the red-eyed boy deepened.  
  
XXX  
  
Hitching a ride into town in the back of one of the vehicles proved to be easy. All it took was ascertaining that the metallic smelly thing moved in the right direction and after that it took a simple jump into the open bed.  
  
It felt a lot more dignifying way of traveling than surviving on animals killed by these vehicles and being chased out of stores. Kurama curled up underneath a loose piece of tarp stuffed in the back of the vehicle and kept his senses primed for any sign of Naruto's chakra.  
  
He knew he would be able to feel the kid if he got close enough. It was hard to hide a powerhouse and Naruto was one of the biggest in the shinobi countries, all thanks to Kurama. And some genes, but Kurama knew it was mostly because of his presence in the boy's stomach. Not literally, thankfully.  
  
His own stomach growled and for a second he reveled in the sensation of hunger. He hadn't felt that in such a long time it was a welcome feeling. Three seconds later he remembered that the feeling sucked. Kurama buried himself deeper into the tarp and tried to remember more of what had happened in those seconds when Kakashi and Obito clashed on the battlefield.  
  
His transformation into this insignificant fox was solely the fault of those space-time ninjutsu the two sharingan-users tried to hit each other with. They both connected to the same dimension, but that dimension mixed with a bijuu-dama [1] the size of Konoha's market district did not end well. Or it could've been Kakashi's fault, he had that knowing look on his face Kurama hated since the day Naruto met the silver-haired man.  
  
And now his mighty consciousness was trapped in the body of a tiny fox. His fur was a darker shade of red than that of his true self. He still possessed all nine of his tails, none of them able to swat shinobi in mid-air and smash boulders into sand. All they were good for was gaining attention from the humans he inevitably came across. It seemed there were a lot more of them around in this place. And barely any of them possessed developed chakra coils. At least it wouldn't be that hard to find the kid, he drew Kurama in like Jiraiya to a brothel. It would take some time to pinpoint his location, but at the moment he had a vague sense of what direction he should go in.  
  
Three days he had been on the road now, hopping from vehicle to vehicle, feeding on animals slain by the same vehicles and drinking rainwater. It was one of the most degrading things Kurama had ever done, and he counted being inside Naruto while he grew up as a particularly annoying child among them. The tarp he was partially hidden under was at least somewhat dignified, and even if the vehicle he hid in was currently stationary, he knew that he moved closer to the boy. Kurama smiled to himself and yipped.  
  
Mentally he fell silent. Did he just – what the – he did not make that sound. The grand nine-tailed demon would never even think of yipping, barking or keening like a common dog. He snarled and growled, sure, those were displays of aggression, and seeing grown shinobi flee before the low rumblings of the demon felt remarkably good.  
  
Carefully Kurama tried to talk, like he always had been capable of. All that escaped him were three short, loud barks and a high-pitched whine.  
  
“Fantastic,” Kurama tried to add to the multitude of animal sounds which wrung their way from his larynx, but that too came out as a sound one of those Inuzuka dogs would make.  
  
The noise he made did not escape into the woods unnoticed. Two young voices shared some excited words with each other before peering over the edge of the otherwise empty bed. The boys looked young, their hair frazzled from the long journey Kurama had been able to partially partake in, and they were loud.  
  
Warily Kurama eyed the boys, tensing his legs underneath him but pretending like it was normal to find a nine-tailed tiny fox in the bed of a vehicle. One of the boys disappeared from view for a second and popped back up with a poking stick held in his smudgy hands. Time to vacate his position.  
  
With one smooth move Kurama snarled at the kids, jumped out of the vehicle bed and ran across the parking lot, squeezing through a wooden fence at the other side.  
  
At least the vehicle had brought him closer to civilization. Even more humans were around, along with many houses and shops. It looked like over here humanity had been able to spread their grubby hands and take hold of everything of value, claiming it as their own. Kurama looked at the overgrown garden he had forced his way into and once again hated the feeling of an empty stomach.  
  
Kurama would find Naruto, this was inevitable. He would find a way to return them both home, preferably regaining his old body, no longer bound by the seal placed on him so long ago. Naruto had thrown the cage wide open and sometimes even gained access through him to the outside world, but it still wasn't the same. Naruto was in control, no matter how hard Kurama had raged and drained Naruto's chakra at one time. But before he could start that task, he had mice to catch in the weeds threatening to overtake the porch.  



	2. Chapter 2

"No, that's water. _This_ is a stethoscope," Dr. Dorian said, although Naruto only understood two words of that sentence: 'no' and 'water'. The cards the lady had handed him before helped him communicate, but it was infinitely easier to be able to say basic phrases instead of sorting through the cards to find the picture he needed.

Thankfully Doran was nice enough to help him learn the language, because Naruto couldn't even read the alphabet they used to write things down. The only way he was able to learn was by interacting with the staff. They had moved him from a single, private room to a room full of patients and he picked up some words from them as well, but with no knowledge of the language he had no context to place them in.

"Water," Naruto began again, pointing at the cup on the nightstand. "Bed, light, food, doctor, patient... Medi-, medi-"

"Medicine," Doran finished for him and Naruto repeated the word.

"Doctor Doran," Naruto said, then his vocabulary fell short. He wanted to ask about whether they had found an interpreter yet, how long until he would be dismissed from the hospital, whether or not the pain pills they put him on had addictive qualities, and why in the hell the doctor had been present inside Kurama's cage.

"Kurama, Kyuubi," he said, pointing at his seal. He needed an expert to take a look at it, check if the injury and subsequent surgery had destroyed it, freeing the demon. He needed to know if Kurama had been spotted. If he had, Naruto was getting out of here, pain be damned. He healed so _slowly_ , he was used to only seeing the inside of a hospital for two, three days at most. By his calculation he had woken up here five days ago, and he had just been moved from critical to less-critical. Or whatever the terms were, Sakura would know, but she wasn't here.

For the first time in his life he was truly alone, without even Kurama's presence. Not that he'd heard the fox's voice before he was twelve or even realized that he was a jinchuuriki [2], but still.

"Paper," he requested after a bewildered look from Doran. Even if he couldn't read the words, he could look at the pictures and check for photos of a giant fox laying waste to a village. Surely that would reach the front page. "Snewpaper," he clarified.

"Newspaper," Doran gently corrected him, getting up off the bed to fetch the paper from wherever he went to get it.

He returned with the newspaper and a dark-haired nurse in tow. She had so many curls in her hair, Naruto had only ever seen that in Lightning Country, and even there that hair type wasn't wide-spread. She wore a different color uniform, the dark red complimenting her brown skin.

"Naruto, nurspanoza," Doran introduced. Naruto tried to repeat the onslaught of consonants and vowels, but it took the woman butting in before Naruto could properly pronounce her name. So nurse Espinosa it was, after being made to repeat it four times until she felt satisfied with the sound of it.

She carried a large book with her which she handed to him. There was a picture of a planet on it, along with the weird letters. Nurse Espinosa leaned over and opened the book, flipping to a certain page. It showed a large continent unlike anything Naruto had ever seen. She pointed at a certain city on that landmass.

"San DiFrangeles, California," she said. She flipped back to a page showing more continents, using an inquiring tone and gesturing at the page.

Naruto's eyes darted left and right, skipping over the text he couldn't read anyway, to look for the shinobi countries. But they were nowhere to be found, not even the symbols they used to represent said countries.

"Fire Country," he said, enunciating clearly. "Konoha."

Nurse Espinosa tapped on the atlas, signaling that he should point out where that was. Naruto shook his head in response. The Fire Country was the biggest shinobi country, it should be visible on this map, but the coastlines looked all wrong.

The gut feeling that something weird was up intensified. No Fire Country meant no home, no Kurama meant no ally, and he couldn't sense any chakra, evil intentions or not. He should be able to sense any remaining Zetsu clones, they couldn't be destroyed that quickly. But there was nothing.

Naruto laid the atlas aside, pushing it away when nurse Espinosa tried to force it on him. He grabbed a piece of paper and drew the leaf symbol, showing it to the medical staff.

"Konoha," he said again, tapping at the drawing with his pencil. They both shook their heads but Doran wrote something down, maybe to look for it later. Naruto quickly drew other symbols of villages, but no recognition dawned. Even civilians could at least place some of those symbols, no matter how far away the village was. Know your enemy was a rule even civilians lived by.

Nurse Espinosa took the atlas away, checked the chart hanging off the bed and walked off, smiling back at him one last time. Doran said something to him in a reassuring tone before he too disappeared, leaving Naruto alone with a lot of questions and a gnawing feeling which was quickly growing into worry.

XXX

"So the kid can't even point at where he's from," Carla summarized. JD paused from trying to balance a pencil on his nose to look at her.

"Maybe he's a savage," he only half-joked. Who the hell didn't know where he or she was from? Or he didn't want to tell... "Or a spy," he continued. "On a mission from Japan to steal nuclear codes."

His mind wandered off, placing the blonde-haired patient in a situation where he faced off with secret service guys aboard a submarine, armed only with two katana and a ladder. He would fly through the air like a ninja, his expert swordsmanship enabling him to pierce the outer hull of the submarine. He had to leave one of his two swords behind, which was sad, since his _sensei_ left it to him after that attack where he-

"Bambi, present." Carla's sharp voice brought him back to the here and now. "He can't or won't tell us. Did you ask him about any family or friends we can contact? He didn't pop up out of nowhere."

"I did," JD said, flipping through the paperwork to get to the picture he wanted to show her. Even using pictographs it was possible to ask about loved ones. But the parental figures in the drawing of a family were crossed out, as were brothers and sisters. Apparently the kid didn't have any grandparents either. Instead the kid had drawn other people, in a minimalistic and cartoony way, exaggerating certain features.

There was a man with a huge scar across his nose, standing next to a gray-haired man holding a book in front of his face. To their left a girl, smaller than either of them but assuming a dominant pose, black gloves adorning her hands. Those were the most detailed drawings. Surrounding the drawing of the family were more people, just faces, but with recognizable features. And who wouldn't notice two people walking around with a black bowl haircut, a boy with triangle tattoos on his cheeks, a dark-haired kid with pretty unique pupils or a guy. toting around a sword almost his own size.

JD studied the picture once more to see if he could spot anyone in the hallways looking for Naruto. The kid didn't arrive here alone, all that talk about Kurama suggested otherwise. He had asked Naruto to draw Kurama, but the blonde had shaken his head and refused.

"Check the backside," JD said. Carla took the page from him, flipped it over and gasped. The boy had drawn more people on that side, engaged in bloody battles, cheerfully hacking away at the friendly faces depicted on the 'family' side of the paper. A big cross and some other warning signs showed that these were unfriendly people. Was Naruto being chased? If so, what organization wore black cloaks with clouds on them?

"We should get him a psych evaluation. Or we need to contact the police," Carla said. JD shook his head.

"I've already called. They can't find anything based on the names or these pictures, though I'm not sure how hard they looked."

"They need to look harder," Carla ordered, but sadly there was no police officer around to act all nurse Espinosa around. "And we definitely need to get him a psych evaluation. Yech."

Quickly she tucked the offending drawing back into the paperwork and shuddered. Naruto didn't have a lot of drawing talent, but the amount of gore in that picture clearly showed that the kid had spent too much time watching violent movies.

XXX

Naruto adapted to the rhythm of the hospital. With Sakura as his teammate (and being a shinobi) he was intimately familiar with the insides of a hospital. Konoha had one big hospital for both shinobi and civilians. When Naruto had returned from his training with Jiraiya Sakura had dragged him in to practice on more than once. She wasn't the only student healer in the place: one Jounin healer could count on teaching three or four Chuunin at a time.

And apparently this hospital worked the same. The students were a bit older, but even with the language barrier Naruto gathered that these people were being taught things.

Whenever Sakura needed to practice, Naruto hadn't objected, but having this gaggle of students surrounding his bed put him a bit on edge. He had liberated a scalpel as a makeshift kunai should Obito or Madara show up, but so far he hadn't found a reason to use it yet.

Whenever an old geezer appeared, the students acted much more nervous. They answered his questions so fast the words blurred together, curling their tongues around syllables Naruto had never even heard before.

Doran jumped forward when the students reached Naruto's bed. He rattled off long terms, the old man asked some questions and they all peered at him like he was a fascinating creature before moving on to the next bed. Naruto hated being treated like an oddity, but he couldn't make his preference known without resorting to complicated diagrams and lots of pointing and shouting. Usually he was up for the shouting and pointing, but the diagrams did him in.

These visits were strange but thankfully short. The true strangeness happened at night, although during the day times Naruto had seen some weird behaviors as well. And he came from a village where Jounin had planted a flag in the term 'crazy' and claimed it as their own.

Singing, balding men roamed the hallways. Their tunes sounded catchy, but they disappeared before sunrise for some reason. The apparent leader of the bunch had a whiny voice and an ill-fitted suit, but the others listened to him nonetheless.

Doran associated with some slightly... off people as well. The dancing black-skinned man he sometimes talked in sync with was one of them. Naruto could read him so easily, he had no emotional shields to speak of. A shinobi was supposed to only care about the mission (Naruto didn't quite follow that rule), but even he was better at hiding his emotions than this man.

"Newbie!"

Doran ran by Naruto's bed, reacting to the non-too subtle call for attention. Naruto had dubbed him 'angry-man', because the only time he smiled was when he was impressed by his own cleverness while yelling at people. Judging by the length of time he talked to people, he chewed them out or told them long-winded anecdotes. But the fear on people's faces told Naruto all he needed to know. This guy ran at least part of this place, if not all of it. He was always around and people came to him for information.

And then there was Doran himself. Naruto couldn't figure out why the doctor had shown up in the mental representation of the seal. Only Sasuke had ever done that, and that was with the use of the sharingan. And this guy showed no sign of the comma'd wheel, no matter how hard Naruto looked. Besides, there were only a few sharingan users left in the world. A shinobi with that bloodline limit would be hunted down in no time and dragged back to Konoha.

"Naruto," someone said, gaining his attention. The dark-skinned man stood at the foot of his bed. "Dr. Turk," he introduced himself. "JD's friend."

"What's up?" Naruto asked, the foreign words coming out a tad slow. Dr. Turk laughed and seated himself on the bed. With gestures and liberal use of the pictographs Dr. Turk said that he was going to check up on the wound.

"Woman, talk, you, two hours," Dr. Turk managed to explain as he checked up on Naruto. The lines on his face deepened as he looked at the redness around the wound. Inflammation was something every shinobi was familiar with, although with Naruto, Kurama took care of any wounds before they could get inflamed. But Naruto knew that the redness and swollen skin generally was an expected, if bad, sign.

"Not good," Dr. Turk confirmed. He continued with an explanation that Naruto didn't really understand, but he picked up that they were going to give him different medicine to combat the inflammation.

"Woman?" Naruto prompted when Dr. Turk pushed away the privacy curtains surrounding the bed. He pulled them back and once again sat down.

"Yeah, woman." He struggled to find the words and/or gestures to explain. "You, house, woman," was as far as he got with Naruto still following his explanation.

"No," Naruto countered, "Konoha. I Konoha." He gestured outside and made a walking motion with his fingers. Well, more like jumping from tree to tree, but that was harder to explain with ten fingers at his disposal.

"Woman, talk," Dr. Turk finished with a slightly disapproving look on his face. This time when he got up Naruto didn't stop him. It looked like they were almost ready to discharge him from the hospital. A good sign, but he didn't have anywhere to go. Maybe that's where the woman came in, to give him a place to stay.

Man, he missed Konoha. Especially Ichiraku. The cooks at this hospital either didn't know what good ramen was or they just didn't care, because the food tasted overcooked and salty. He wondered when he would get to taste that lovely ramen again, because Obito had a real chance of taking it all away. He needed to get out of here, but he knew that he was no use while he still had a hole in his stomach and no Kurama to back him up. He was good, but he wasn't perfect. He had little chance against Obito if he wasn't at full strength. He would still try, though, if Obito showed up right now.

"Sorry, guys, I'll come back as soon as I can," he promised the empty air.

XXX

JD shot another worrying glance at the chart as he read it again. At first sight the wound on and inside Naruto progressed nicely, but there were inexplicable spikes of fever and Naruto himself acted as restless as a pregnant woman with constant Braxton-Hicks scares. The fevers didn't go away even when they gave him suppressants, although they only peaked for two to three hours before receding.

Despite his digging in literature and textbooks, he could find no precedent. Fevers were gradual processes, they didn't pop up and wander off into the woods later on, only to come back with a previously unheard of friend.

There were other strange things about Naruto, most of them contradictions. The language, of course, as well as the tattoos. The kid had calloused hands and tan lines on his body, which meant that he was outside a lot and probably not a scholar. The fact that he couldn't even point out where he lived was another factor. But he had healthy teeth, so he probably had access to other facilities of the modern world. And the tattoo looked too perfect to be done with anything other than a professional needle. The whisker tattoos were strange though, JD had briefly looked into it but he couldn't find any tribe that used whisker marks as decoration.

On the medicinal side of things, Naruto seemed to possess a secondary lymphatic system, threading throughout his entire body but not transporting the lymph it usually did. Instead, it appeared to be empty, but the pathways were still there, lying dormant.

He needed advice. And to him there was only one way to go about that.

XXX

Naruto's chakra was weak, but there, on the edge of his senses. It had been there for days now, teasing him with its proximity but still staying out of reach.

It could have been worse, Kurama thought to himself, he could have been dropped on the other side of this strange planet. Taking a cross-planet trip as a tiny fox wouldn't be one of the most pleasant things Kurama had ever done.

But neither was hitching a ride on the rear riding step of a garbage truck. Kurama's nose had given up fifteen minutes ago and called it a day, leaving his olfactory sense shut down. At least, he hoped that would happen soon, because although the garbage truck moved in the right direction, the smell was astoundingly bad.

"He'd better appreciate this," Kurama muttered to himself, the stupid larynx transforming it into a bunch of yips and barks. That was another thing, how in the world was he going to communicate with these animalistic sounds? Once for yes, twice for no was no use if Naruto didn't ask the right questions. And that wasn't likely to happen, the boy was not a genius.

The garbage truck took two lefts and a right and for the first time since he arrived Naruto's chakra actually felt near. Kurama smiles to himself and nearly lost his balance on the small step when the garbage truck's driver slammed down on the brakes. Only his claws kept him in position, as well as one of his nine tails wrapped around a nearby handhold.

When the garbage truck took a wrong turn, away from Naruto's chakra, Kurama waited until it almost came to a stop before elegantly jumping down from the truck. Less elegant was the yelp of pain he gave as his right front paw landed on a piece of glass swept into the gutter. He limped over to the sidewalk and checked out the wound. It bled, but it looked like it would bleed itself clean.

Living in a shinobi world taught him how to hide quickly and efficiently, so Kurama holed up at the rear door of some kind of restaurant to wait out the healing.

With the food and relative rest of the past five days his chakra coils had filled right back up. They were nowhere near his usual levels, but a small wound like this would close up and heal in thirty minutes. If only he could actually use his chakra to form his more … creative attacks, but being stuck in this corporeal body instead of his mostly chakra-formed one, he was stuck to utilizing chakra to only strengthen his body and aid his speed and jumps. And heal from wounds fairly quickly. Well, compared to a civilian, anyway.

Kurama's nose picked up the scent of food and he spent another thirty minutes kicking over dumpsters and biting bones in half the restaurant had thrown out to get to the nutritious marrow. He surveyed over the mess he left behind and nodded to himself. At least as small as he currently was, he could still cause some chaos.

Naruto's chakra tugged him in the right direction and Kurama set off once more, heading for wherever the kid stayed. He stuck to the narrow streets and backyards, jumping from rooftop to rooftop as fast as his chakra-aided steps would allow him. It wouldn't be long now before he found the kid and they could work this out.

XXX

"So... nothing?" Elliot asked when JD finally emerged from his literature study coma. She handed him a cup of coffee and he clung to it like platelets to a blood clot.

"Not yet," JD corrected her. "Dr. Cox told me 'Gee, Sally, it surprises me that you were even able to become a resident and torture me every day when you can't even answer such a simple question yourself. Slip on those nerdy thick glasses you secretly like so much and tell me if the answer can't be found somewhere inside that sensitive heart'. So he either doesn't know or thinks I should look it up, his rant kinda went in two directions." He gestured to the pile of books and papers strewn across the table. "So here I am, since, hm, four hours since my shift ended, but-"

"Nothing," Elliot finished for him and JD hung his head and continued its downward descent until his forehead hit the large pages with tiny text of 'Study of the Lymphatic System'.

"Go to bed, JD," Elliot said, poking him in the shoulder. "But if you do, give me back that coffee. I've switched swifts with Doug and I'm working with Dr. Steadman."

Silently JD slid the cup back over to Elliot without even lifting his head and she slammed it back with vigor.

"Go to bed, JD," Elliot repeated, closing a few books and gathering up the papers before departing the doctor's lounge JD had commandeered for his research purposes.

After a few more minutes of silent contemplation (and almost falling asleep right then and there) JD cleaned up the remaining books and papers, piling up his notes so he could review them when his head didn't feel like he lifted weights with it.

He swung by the kid's room one more time to check up on him. Since it was now well into the AM territory, he was as silent as he could be while drawing the privacy curtains closed around the kid's bed.

The kid was in the middle of one of the bouts of fever, hair matted with sweat and legs and arms akimbo, muttering in that strange language of his. JD checked the chart. He had been given fever suppressants two hours ago, but something in his body overrode the medicine. The fever wasn't high and thus not that dangerous to his system, but the cycle was unlike anything JD had ever seen. Quick to come and quick to go, not complying with normal post-surgery inflammation fever.

Unclear blue eyes darted in his direction and Naruto said something, reaching out for him.

JD wouldn't be JD if he didn't answer the clear call for help. He took the boy's outstretched hands and talked to him in a soothing tone, sitting down on the bed. Naruto probably didn't understand him, but he did respond to the attention.

"Sasuke," Naruto said, a look of recognition dawning on his face. The next second he got angry for some reason, shifting his body up against the pillows until he sat up. He wasn't quite clear-headed though, because he ranted at JD about something. He barely paused to take a break, he kept on going, hurt and confusion and determination apparent in his tone.

"Naruto," JD tried to interrupt. The kid talked right over him. JD got up from the bed and disentangled himself from the surprisingly strong grip.

"You've got a fever, Naruto. You need to sleep it off. Go back to sleep." He reached over the kid to fluff up the pillows and entice him to lay back down, but his hands got slapped away. "Naruto, sleep," he said. He knew that was one of the words in the kid's English vocabulary, he taught it to him himself. But Naruto didn't respond to it. Instead he gestured and pointed and sounded so _angry_ as he ranted on. Maybe he babbled nonsense, JD had no frame of reference. But whoever this Sasuke was, he or she had some influence on Naruto to set him off like that. Or maybe he talked about how yellow bananas were, but there was no reason to be that upset about it.

JD let Naruto talk until he shut his mouth one last time with an audible click of his teeth. The frown, which made him seem three years older, slowly melted away, as did the redness in his cheeks. It looked like the fever was crashing down, going as fast as it had come.

"Doran," Naruto said, blue eyes clear and alert. "No Sasuke. You Doran." He chuckled to himself but there was a forced quality to it JD didn't like.

"Newbie!" Dr. Cox yanked the curtains open like he owned this part of the hospital and got so close to JD he could spot the minuscule nick on his neck where his mentor had cut himself while shaving.

"What in whatever deity's name are you doing in here while I asked you to disimpact Ms. Rodriguez, oh, I don't know, four hours ago? I know you're having fun with your blond Japanese buddy but when I tell you to _do_ something, you damn well better _do_ it before I find you and believe me, you're better off shoveling manure than coming across me when you're busy avoiding work."

"Actually, Dr. Cox, I got off after I disimpacted Ms. Rodriguez. Have been off for four hours, now." JD watched the vein on Dr. Cox' forehead throb as he waited for the reply. The narrowed eyes, the stormy stare, it sure was full-on rant mode.

"Then what are you doing here? Go on, git, run while you still can!" Dr. Cox did his whistle thing and JD scurried from the room, throwing one small "bye!" towards the confused Naruto. His care was in other hands now, he did all he could for the moment.

But all night he wondered who this 'Sasuke' was.

* * *

[2] Jinchuuriki = Tailed Beast human host


	3. Chapter 3

Carla had seen miracles happen. She had seen people come in, teetering on the brink of death and walk out on their own two legs a day later. A man with a steel rod through his brain survived and paralyzed kids could play after an inexplicable recovery. Those were the medical miracles.

But a fox walking up the side of the hospital was a whole other category of miracle. Sure, cats could climb up certain walls using their claws, she had seen enough spider-cat clips on the internet to know that. But this fox casually walked upwards without ever caring about gravity or using his claws. He seemed to be heading to a destiny only he knew, because he altered course here and there, jumping over an air conditioner vent and landing on the wall, seemingly sticking to it with glue. Or crazy gecko feet.

Did foxes have tentacles on their paws?

Carla looked away from the fox to look around her and see if anyone else saw that, or if she had slipped into a daydream. JD's unique condition had better not be contagious, or else Carla was going to make sure the young doctor's thoughts wouldn't wander off again.

There were two visitors smoking outside and Carla walked up to them. "Excuse me-"

"Not you too!" one of the smokers said. He looked young to be wearing the professional suit he sported, but his voice already held the wheeze of a chain smoker. "Look, lady, we're _allowed_ to smoke here, no patients over here, so just-"

"Ex _cuse_ me,I was only going to ask you if you saw a fox. Up there." She pointed at the wall where she had seen the fox stroll around.

"No," the smoker replied immediately. His buddy, also dressed in a smart suit, nodded along.

"I did see a fox yesterday, but not around here. And definitely not on the roof."

Carla looked both men in the eyes. They seemed to be telling the truth. "Alright, keep an eye out and if you do see one, please contact reception."

She turned their back on them and looked over the building one more time. There was no sign that a minute ago a wild animal easily ignored the laws of physics to head into a patient's room, most likely. Most of the rooms had a window open, so the fox could have jumped into any one's room.

Carla mentally added 'rabies' to the list of diseases she would keep an eye out for and headed back inside. She _really_ hoped that she had dreamed up the whole thing, she had no time to deal with animal control. And people would panic, it would all become one big mess if a fox somehow got into the hospital.

* * *

Naruto wiped at his forehead to get rid of the last of the fever sweat. A nurse had left him the damp cloth he had asked for – well, pointed to a picture of a towel and water – and refused to let her sponge him off. He was not a fan of hospitals in the first place, but being stuck in one for so long was a harrowing experience for him. The wound _still_ hadn't healed completely and the fevers exhausted him. The severe hallucinations that came with them were no prize either. Doran's superficial resemblance to Sasuke sent him into his 'how can I become Hokage if I can't even save my friends' mode and the existential questions that came with that were exhausting in their own right.

They had actually given him a private room, because they were now testing him for a contagious disease. Or maybe he made too much noise as he tried to communicate, because it was hard to resist talking louder when people didn't understand you.

The woman Dr. Turk had told him would come by tried to make something clear to him, but Naruto wasn't sure he completely got her after she had left.

Apparently, because he was sixteen, in this country he needed to go live in a house with older people until he became eighteen. For some reason, at that moment you were considered an adult. Until then houses existed for young people to live together under the care of an adult. And he would be transferred to that place when the fevers were gone or at least under control.

Not that there was any way Naruto was going to go to that house. As soon as the fevers died down he was getting out and looking for Kurama.

A thump by the window drew his attention. A fox stood on the ground, red fur, whiskers and all. For a moment Naruto was puzzled by this development. He was on the fourth floor, in a city far from any big forests if the atlas he had looked at was any indication. What in the world was a fox doing in his hospital room?

Then he noticed the details. The shade of the fur, the red eyes. The paws were brown to black, smudges of dust and other road debris scattered across the fur. It looked like this fox had been on the road for a while. The animal was large, larger than any foxes Naruto had seen thus far. If he stood, the fox would reach to his waist. He smelled like Kiba when he had just bathed Akamaru. The most significant feature was the black circles around the eyes, sweeping all the way back to his long ears.

That, and the nine tails, all swishing about behind his back gave away the fox's identity.

"Kurama!" Naruto called out, sitting up straighter in the hospital bed. The lips of the fox didn't move, but Naruto still heard the familiar voice in his head.

 _Kid_ , he greeted. Kurama walked closer to the hospital bed, sitting on his haunches right next to it but keeping his eyes trained on Naruto's.

The reason Kurama smelled like wet dog was because he was, well, wet. Naruto resisted wrinkling his nose. He had no idea how powerful Kurama was at the moment, but even if he was powerless, he still had teeth and claws and Naruto had no healing factor whatsoever. So he didn't make a comment about it.

"You're tiny," Naruto observed. Kurama growled, and this time the noise was out loud. The discontent was apparent in Kurama's tone.

 _I'm aware. Now explain how you were stupid enough to get caught in Obito's space-time ninjutsu_ _and caused all this to happen_.

Naruto laughed sheepishly and apologized, soon thereafter launching into what had happened to him since he woke up in the field. Kurama sat there, listening, making snide remarks inside Naruto's head and generally acting un-foxlike.

* * *

Something smelled off, Carla knew. It took her a few seconds to place the smell, but then it hit her. Rowdy. In a bathtub.

"I swear, if that dead dog shows up in here I'm turning that hide into a throw rug," she said to herself as she looked up and down the hospital hallways.

There had been no other witnesses who saw the fox run up the side of the building, and no reports of a live fox in here yet either. It could have been a prank, an animatronic robot on a wire. It wouldn't be the first time either Turk or JD used stuffed animals to fool her, although if it were up to her, the last time was the actual _last_ time. That dead dog was creepy.

Carla headed out to check up on patients, administering medicine, placing a calming hand here, changing a dressing there, generally being a great nurse. While working the fox had slipped from her mind, until she entered the room of Naruto the Flash Card Kid.

She checked up on him, made sure that he currently didn't have a fever and his condition hadn't worsened before changing the dressing on the surgery wound. It was coming along nicely, he wasn't healed yet but on his way there. The post-surgery inflammation had trouble dying down though, the skin was still red, and then there were the weird fever spikes. JD insisted on keeping him in until they could figure out what caused them, and Carla had backed Bambi up.

Naruto didn't resist and tried to communicate with her, but he was tense. He couldn't, or wouldn't, tell her why though. He didn't appear scared, so she made a mental note to pop by in an hour to see if he was still that tense.

Once done tending to his wounds, she turned around and saw it. Sitting quietly in the corner, almost wedged there, ramrod straight and with his fluffy tail curled around his paws. The red fox she had seen run up the building. He looked straight at her, unafraid. He looked... defiant.

Carla wasn't necessarily afraid of wild animals, but she wasn't often close to an unrestrained wild animal. She remembered a kid from her block that died of rabies after being bitten by a stray fox.

She sprang into action. Without making any sudden moves Carla undid the brakes on the bed and pulled it towards the door, keeping an eye on the fox. It made no further move besides following her movements with his head, ears pricked forward. The bed was heavy but once in motion, easier to pull.

But Naruto reacted a bit different to her expectations. He should be terrified (and slightly puzzled) how a fox managed to get onto the fourth floor. Because there was no way he ran up the side of the hospital, that was plain nuts. Instead of being glad that Carla was rescuing him from rabies and further pain, he yelled in his own language and struggled out of bed.

"Get back in bed!" Carla yelled right back, but Naruto pointed at the fox and made a lot of noise, walking a few steps towards it on shaky legs.

"Naruto, stay here!" She poked her head around the corner. "Security!"

Gently she pulled at the kid's hospital gown, trying to get him to come with her. But Naruto turned his back to the fox and threw both his arms wide, shielding it from view. He had a fierce scowl on his face, the paleness of major surgery still visible but that only seemed to add to the look of protection. This fox meant something to him.

"Kurama," he said, jerking towards the fox with his head. "Patient. I patient, Kurama patient."

Carla didn't get what he tried to say, but to Naruto it seemed important that she understood. Slowly she nodded. Naruto's tenseness abated a bit, but he didn't relax his open-armed stance.

"What's the matter, Carla?" Leonard the security guard asked from the doorway.

"There's a _fox_ in this room," Carla said, beckoning him in while keeping her eyes trained on the strange duo. Were foxes domesticable? Was this Naruto's pet? If so – why didn't Naruto speak a lick of English? In six days a fox couldn't cross that much distance, so he had to be from around here somewhere.

"A fox?" Leonard asked incredulously. He stepped inside the room and looked around the corner of the bathroom. For the briefest second Carla looked at him before turning back to the kid. Naruto still stood in front. He had brought his hands together, holding them in some kind of shape. He looked ready to take on anyone, quite aggressively.

But the fox had been replaced by a boy standing behind Naruto. He looked about the same age, but with dark red hair instead of blond. It stuck out in all kinds of directions as well. The boy had sunken eyes, the light creating shadows that seemed to suggest darkness surrounding the … red pupils. He was half a head taller than Naruto, and Carla _knew_ he hadn't been there before. But the fox couldn't have changed, could he?

But there was undeniably something dangerous about the boy. He wore a black t-shirt, but the pants looked weird. They were dark, but ended mid-shin. White bandages wrapped around his legs so no skin showed and he wore black open-toed sandals. The boy had tattooed three whisker marks on each cheek and Carla spotted the edge of a larger tattoo on his arms.

The big ears offset the edgy look of the boy, jutting out the side of his head as if they got glued on by a first grader with no clue of what ears were supposed to look like.

"Naruto, who is this?" Carla asked slowly, pointing at the boy. Naruto understood her and he looked over his shoulder. His eyes widened minutely but when he turned back he was calm, although his hands were still clenched in that pose.

"Kurama," Naruto said. "Kurama, nurse Espinosa," he continued the introduction. He added some more syllables meant for Kurama's benefit, no doubt.

"Carla, do you need me to get rid of this guy?" Leonard asked. Carla slowly shook her head. Had she hallucinated the fox? This guy's hair somewhat resembled the fox's fur coloring, but he was clearly human.

"No, thanks, Leonard, it's alright."

"You don't need me to check the next room?" Leonard asked, the standard security question in case any nurse (or doctor) wasn't able to talk freely but the situation required more security personnel or police.

"The patient in the next room is asleep, so no need to," Carla answered, declining the offer to call the police on the red-haired kid.

Leonard nodded and left, leaving Carla staring down the two kids by herself. She extended her hand towards Kurama.

"Nice to meet you, Kurama, it's good to see that Naruto isn't all alone in this country. You don't speak English by any chance?"

Kurama's look was utterly blank, answering her question for her. Carla tried it in Spanish, but like with Naruto, no dice.

Naruto drew her attention by jerking his thumb over his shoulder. "He no..." he trailed off, making a talking motion with his hand. Apparently JD's English lessons came along nicely if the kid could use personal pronouns now and didn't mix up the syntax all the time.

Kurama took to glowering at every occupant of the room. He pushed past Naruto and strolled to the open window, crossing his arms. No sound passed his lips, but his body language said it all. He was annoyed with something or someone, and Naruto either didn't care enough to help or didn't know what to do about it.

With quick and efficient movements Carla rolled the bed back into place and put the brakes on before helping Naruto back into bed. Kurama was an eerie guard at the window, keeping his arms crossed but making no move to assist her. Carla wanted him out of the room, but knew that Naruto would not give up his guest so easily, not when he was the only other guy Naruto recognized. And finding out where the kid came from was important as well, so they could finally alert his family and send him home.

So Carla left them behind, making a mental note to pop back in in fifteen minutes and write down Kurama's address.

There was finally some headway on this patient, but the appearance and subsequent disappearance of the fox still bothered her. Had she finally snapped?

* * *

Naruto quickly moved out of bed once nurse Espinosa had left. He had sort of made peace with the demon fox, but he still didn't like sitting in a vulnerable position with him present in the room. In a variation of the form he was used to, but still. Speaking of...

"Why do you look like that?" Naruto demanded. "I henge'd [3] you another look."

Kurama uncrossed his arms and took a step closer. Naruto had wanted to give the fox a generic look, blending in like any good shinobi. Somehow the fox turned it around on him, morphing the look into that of a red-head orchestrating an apocalypse.

 _If I have to appear human, I am not going to walk around with blond hair and green eyes,_ Kurama remarked. _And_ good job _on the vocal cords._

"I wanted to pass you off as my brother, but now I have to come up with a cover story why you look nothing like me! The mute thing is easier to handle."

_You could have said we have a summoning contract. Why did you transform me in the first place?_

Naruto huffed and looked away. There were a couple of reasons his rational mind supplied him, but it was mostly a gut reaction. Something about the reaction of the nurse and the guy with the big hair and hook for a hand felt off, so Naruto winged it. As usual. That, and the fact that the map of the world was wrong, the language was so foreign and he had yet to see a medic-nin walk these halls. In fact, he hadn't seen anyone use chakra yet, come to think of it.

"Because," Naruto said. He knew that Kurama could read his intentions as well as when the demon fox was inside the cage, so he glossed over it and barreled straight into the good part of his questions. "Where are you going to stay?"

_Much as I hate to admit, I'm sticking by you. I've got no thumbs and in this world, that's a problem._

"And you're tiny," Naruto added. He was so used to seeing the demon fox as big teeth and eye sockets he could cram his whole body into, but now Kurama was smaller than Akamaru and he had trouble linking the two together.

 _Yes,_ Kurama ground out, _now will you get to work and start contacting the allied forces? I want a rematch with Uchiha Madara._

"Ah, yes, about that..." Naruto replied. He told Kurama about the wrong maps nurse Espinosa had shown him, about all the ting wrong things adding up to one big conclusion: they were further from home than ever, and Naruto wasn't sure how they were going to get back.

* * *

"Yo, copy-nin, get started on those seals!" Bee shouted from afar over the din of battle. Kakashi knew that the jinchuuriki would have his back amidst the waves of clones, even if he barely knew the guy. He was good at what he did and what he did was mow down white clone after white clone using his demon body. There wasn't much that could stand up to all eight tentacles of Hachibi, and the clones were no exception. A few lucky ones escaped with their lives and most of their limbs intact, but there was a whole allied army ready to fight those.

Kakashi accessed the memory the stolen Sharingan had implanted into his brain and he let the chakra guide his hands into seal after seal. It was a ridiculously long set of seals, but once started, it could not be broken or _bad_ things would happen.

Ox. Rabbit. Tiger. Dragon.

Like the disappearance of Naruto. One second the yellow shinobi was at his side, fighting Kakashi's former teammate, and the next he was simply... gone. Someone had interrupted the swirling ninjutsu attack Obito threw at Naruto, sucking him in. But before he could complete the technique, someone in the allied forces had attacked the mastermind behind it all. So Naruto popped away to unknown shores and Kakashi was going to follow him. He was still his pupil, after all, and part of team 7. Sort of.

Rabbit. Snake. Horse. Ox.

Kakashi had to make sure he broke off at the exact same seal Obito had. The connection between their eyes would enable Kakashi to transport himself to wherever Naruto had gone. They needed his power, and he needed to be sure Naruto hadn't been caught and stripped of his tenant. If that had happened Killer Bee truly was the last of his kind.

Monkey. Bird. Tiger. Tiger.

If you didn't count Obito's crazy plan, that was. Becoming the ten-tails jinchuuriki, it sounded insane. But the shinobi could pull it off, Kakashi knew that.

A white clone appeared to his left, Kakashi could count the ridges on the skin where the left eye should be. He kept on flashing through the seals, and sure enough, one of Bee's tentacles appeared and slammed the clone six feet under. The shudder of the trembling ground would throw off anyone's focus, but Kakashi kept on plowing through. He was built for this, he had done this so many times in his life.

Ox. Dog. Dragon. Ram. Horse.

Finally, he neared the last couple of seals before Obito got interrupted and had to abort the jutsu, with the kidnapping results. Mentally he prepared himself for pain, because that sort of thing usually happened.

The tentacle that had slammed into the ground inches from Kakashi morphed into Bee. He looked serious, all traces of rap gone.

"Take me with you," he demanded, laying a hand on Kakashi's shoulder. The copy-nin had no time to argue, he was at the last seal. He finished it and focused the right amount of chakra into his body, copying Obito's jutsu down to the millisecond.

And he was right, being transported to... somewhere... hurt.

* * *

Doctor John Dorian was many things, but graceful he was not. On his best days he weaved around the hospital like an excited kitten, overshooting things and sliding into walls. Ever since he learned how to crawl he had ever-present bruises from his many, many falls adorning part of his body. Sometimes it was the hip, often his shins, and on one memorable occasion he managed to bruise his left ear.

So Johnny the tackling Alzheimer patient was a worthy foe for him, since the man could appear out of nowhere and body slam him into the ground. He had to have been a frontlineafterbacker or something rugby-related, because his tackles were fast and efficient. And it was definitely an explanation for his memory loss, because if other athletes tackled like that...

Johnny the tackling Alzheimer patient was sadly getting sick more and more often, so the assisted living facility and the hospital engaged in their little turf-o-war, bouncing him around the place. Nobody wanted to deal with a patient who could still sneak out under the noses of four nurses and find the nearest doctor. Sometimes he went for patients, but only if they wore something blue. Johnny seemed to have a thing for blue clothes, only tackling JD whenever he wore blue. Which was _always_ inside the hospital.

JD walked down the hallway, heading towards the patient in room 136. Here and there patients shuffled in the hallways, clutching their IV-stands, wheeling in chairs or, if they were lucky and felt slightly better, just walking. JD nodded at a few of his patients, his mind already on the bad news he had to deliver to the patient in room 136. At times it could be an unlucky room, more so than other rooms.

The sight of the blond Japanese kid out in the hallways was a new one, but JD was glad that the kid had recovered to the point of walking around without any aid. Kurama, the mute friend who seemed glued to Naruto's side was absent at the moment.

To JD's credit, this time he saw Johnny coming. The Alzheimer patient still had a strong set of legs and he used it to sprint down the corridor, heading towards poor, blue-robe-wearing Naruto. JD shouted a warning, but he knew he was too late to do anything about it.

Johnny leaped forward, angling for Naruto's chest with his arms outstretched, his left shoulder slightly forward to bear the brunt of the impact. JD hoped that Naruto wouldn't sue.

"Who am I?" Johnny screamed, and that finally alerted Naruto to the incoming threat. What happened next, happened within a second and later on JD would have trouble describing exactly what transpired to Turk.

Naruto ducked the tackle and sprung up half a second later, when Johnny was halfway over him already. With open hand he pushed against the man's ribcage, hurling him upwards before he clenched the blue robe many patients wore and brought Johnny back down to the ground at an angle. With a painful sounding crunch Johnny landed next to Naruto, bouncing once before laying still. Naruto whipped out a scalpel from seemingly nowhere and knelt on the guy's back, making Johnny gasp for air as the skinny knees dug into his spine, keeping him pinned to the ground.

JD could never hope to be as graceful as that, debilitating a flying tackle at the last second so efficiently and quickly, not to mention the weight difference between the two. Naruto was small for his age, and although Johnny didn't have much muscle mass, he could still tackle really well, as JD could attest to (multiple times).

There was so much fishy stink surrounding the kid it was like he lived on a shrimp boat all his life and now the stench finally wafted across the space. Wait, that metaphor wasn't right.

 _That was just beautiful. Too bad you almost saw him too late, you're getting rusty already_ , a deep voice whispered in JD's mind.

'Shaddap, like you saw him,' Naruto's voice countered, in perfectly understandable English. But his mouth was closed as he said it.

"Alright, show's over," an attending doctor announced, snapping JD from hearing freaky voices. "What the hell were you thinking, kid? Give me that scalpel and get off him!"

Before JD could interfere on behalf of his patient, Dr. Cox arrived and yelled at the other attending about letting Johnny tackle another patient without the attending trying to stop him.

"Yeah!" JD shouted enthusiastically when Dr. Cox made a striking remark, but the poisonous look Dr. Cox threw him made him scurry away from the scene. He did _not_ want to end up with more scutwork than usual.

* * *

In between bouts of fever Naruto made time to check out how many of his abilities were missing now that Kurama walked around in a fox body outside the sealed cage. It was still a bit unnerving to be on the receiving end of those red eyes. Well, the red hair bothered Naruto more. It reminded him of Gaara, and how murderous he had been before Naruto converted him with the power of his fists.

The bushes outside the hospital was as good a place to train as any, although Naruto still preferred the lush woods of Konoha.

Keeping his techniques a secret had never been his forte, but even Konoha's number one surprising ninja knew when not to give away every jutsu he knew. S-rank jutsu were that rank for a reason, after all. So into the bushes he went, silently creating a clone to spar with and another to form various phases of the Rasengan with.

The chakra drain of the whirling ball of deadly wind hadn't been much of an issue for the chakra powerhouse. He could pull off multiple ones in a row without his stamina taking a hit. The rasen-shuriken, however, was another story. With a clone sitting in the hospital bed gathering nature chakra, Naruto was able to create one. With a grin on his face and sweat on his brow he watched it spin, the edges slicing through the bushes, throwing leaves everywhere.

A cramp in the arm holding the wind attack messed it all up, however. Whether it was the lack of chakra molding over the last week, the absence of the demon fox or random chance, nevertheless the rasen-shuriken wobbled in his hands. He tried to hold onto it, ride out the seizing muscles, but it was no use. Naruto threw the attack away from him, unable to control the wind any longer but he didn't want to cut himself in half with it.

It left a path of destruction in its wake as it rushed through the bushes and crashed into the black stuff covering the street, burrowing into the ground. Naruto pulled a face usually reserved for 'oh shit' situations. Quickly he peered through the bushes to see if anybody was around. Maybe he should've thought of that before he threw the lethal attack, but as usual it was a split-second decision.

With a rising shriek the rasen-shuriken exploded, but luckily it didn't expand all the way. The street caved in where the rasen-shuriken had exploded, creating a neat tunnel in the parking lot of the hospital.

Naruto realized he should have probably let the attack fizzle out when he watched the destruction. If any civilians had been around, they would have been vaporized. The loud noise was sure to attract attention though, so he jumped from the bushes and sprinted up the side of the hospital, joining Kurama inside his room. The clone had popped and Kurama looked mightily amused.

 _Good show,_ Kurama said, the sarcasm dripping like drool from his fang-like teeth.

"I'd like you to do any better. You haven't even got proper hands."

Kurama growled at him and Naruto sat on the bed, massaging the muscles in his hand. What the hell just happened?

* * *

If it was one thing Kurama knew, that this situation was only going to get worse before it got even remotely better. That this would come to pass only affirmed his belief that as the strongest and most-tail-possessing demon, he was also the one to attract the most trouble. Usually he could deal with that by roaring at it and stomping it into oblivion with one swing of his mighty paw, but at the moment he didn't have that ability in his arsenal.

Hell, he couldn't even talk properly at the moment, save from talking directly inside Naruto's head. But the local language was as much gobbledygook to him as it was to the kid.

So there was little he could do as he observed the fevers getting worse and lasting longer. The incident with the rasen-shuriken should have clued him in, but like Naruto, he was not used to the kid being weaker than before. So when the white-coats came and added an IV-drip, Kurama didn't think much of it.

They ushered him out of the room beforehand, but Kurama was able to observe it through the window of the room, which they forgot to close the blinds of.

Naruto whined about the IV-drip, but the fevers kept on coming. So they gave him other medicine, and now Kurama felt something was going horribly south.

These people didn't work with chakra, he couldn't feel even a drop of it in their bodies. Their pathways were closed and they relied on pills to cure whatever ailed Naruto. But they weren't doing a good enough job, because the paleness remained, the hallucinations stayed and Kurama couldn't even talk properly without sounding like a trained poodle.

Hanging around here was not going to help them in the slightest. Kurama saw that the medicine did help combat the pain that came with fever, but they still had to _go_ , figure out how to get home. Naruto could deal with a little pain, the guy once tore off his entire epidermis but still stayed conscious. Alright, so that may have been Kurama's doing, but still.

 _Up and at them, kid,_ Kurama said, moving towards the bed to help Naruto out the window and finally get some answers.

But the kid didn't respond. He lay there, sweating and moaning at something in a fevered dream. Probably about Sasuke, the kid would _not_ let that one go. At any rate, he knew he would be kicked out any second by a nurse claiming that Naruto needed to rest. Thankfully the henge barely took up any chakra and Naruto's control had grown significantly over the years, resulting in Kurama still looking like a human.

Or maybe not, Kurama thought as the jutsu dissipated, leaving him without hands or any means to open the door, except by grabbing the handle with his teeth. In a hospital, this wasn't as wise as one might think, what with all the foreign bacteria everywhere. Sickness wasn't something the great nine-tails had to think about, but he still had a body, and it could get sick. After all, he was in a frail enough body as it were, getting sick on top of it would be his luck.

For the umpteenth time Kurama cursed Obito and Kakashi.

The mighty nine-tailed fox jumped up on the bed and batted at the kid's face with his paw.

 _Wake up and henge me, already_ , Kurama demanded. But the usually loud voice didn't appear, the blue eyes stayed closed. Kurama decided that pain was a far better step to achieve results, so he raked his claws across Naruto's arm, drawing blood, albeit not much. Even that didn't wake the kid. Kurama resolved to wait the bout of fever out, since it was likely that nothing would rouse him, or the drugs they gave him had to run its course. As long as no nurse showed up to chase him out of the room, or straight up kill him.

"Here lies Kurama, the mighty nine-tailed demon fox, killed by a civilian nurse somewhere on a planet not even his own," he muttered to himself, only it came out as tiny yips and a pitiful whine.

He laid down on the floor, keeping his eyes trained on Naruto for any signs of consciousness.

Like he thought, things had to get worse before they could get any better, because after fifteen minutes the black-haired doctor appeared and did a double-take at the presence of a relatively large fox at the bedside of the patient.

* * *

[3] Henge - Transformation


	4. Chapter 4

All it took was a tap on his shoulder to send Kakashi to his feet, kunai in his hand. He was poised for battle in the same amount of time it took for a father to declare the guy his daughter brought home a total jerk and unworthy of her attention. An impressive feat, since fathers were biologically primed to reject those usurping males.

Since Kakashi didn't have children of his own, he would never find out how fast this could be.

"You okay? You alright? It's been quite a day, I didn't mean to fright," came the smooth sing-song voice of Killer Bee from Kakashi's left.

The jinchuuriki looked unharmed, the wear and tear of the battle they had broken free off was still visible on his clothing, though.

"I'm fine," Kakashi said after a quick self-check. Getting transported across dimensions left pangs of pain all over his body, but he had taken on S-class nin with far more severe injuries.

With himself and his companion taken care of he surveyed the surroundings. How many weird humans or even aliens would they come across? Were the trees purple, was the sky green, or were humans physically and mentally unable to summon giant meteorites from the sky in this dimension?

But the surrounding landscape was _boring_ , to put it mildly. They stood on a plowed field, the smell of dirt heavy in the air. It was early morning and a startled hare sped away in the distance. Not a single pink patch of grass in sight, the trees further off carried the same swathe of green colors as they did back home.

In the fuzzy light of the dawn Kakashi spotted buildings off in the distance, rising up from the fog clinging low to the ground and it between the rows. Tiny plants were planted in neat rows, a perfect amount of space between each plant and its neighbor. An efficient farmer had to have done that, perhaps one with as much focus as a shinobi.

Sadly, Naruto was nowhere in sight. Kakashi critically eyed the fog swirling softly across the field, looking for the telltale bump of a body. He couldn't feel Naruto's chakra nearby, and that said something, because last time he checked the boy carried enough to level two plains and a village, if they were lucky enough to seal him in time.

So Kakashi looked for a body instead. Killer Bee was more optimistic about the situation.

"Have you seen, where Naruto's at? He couldn't have been, dragged away like that. So fast, yo."

"You take the left, I take the right," Kakashi said, hands flashing into the seals to call for his nin-dogs. But none appeared. Something twisted his seals around and blocked them from penetrating the void between dimensions, he could at least feel that. But no dogs meant no back-up, no way to sniff out Naruto's scent.

The old-fashioned way, then, Kakashi decided. He created some kage bunshin [4] and scattered them across the field, keeping in shouting range of each other.

They spent ten minutes scouring the field (and the surrounding fields) but ultimately decided that Naruto wasn't here. Nothing was keeping him shielded, his senses whispered to him.

"Did you bring us to the right dimension?" Bee asked, the way he didn't rap those words speaking volumes that this was a genuine concern. If they had somehow jumped to the wrong dimension, Kakashi could repeat the seals and hopefully that would catapult them right back. But the copy-nin did not like the way his kuchiyose-seals had bounced off some kind of barrier in the void. They had taken a risk by leaping over the edge, but if they found out halfway down that there wasn't a stunt cushion down there, well, that would be just their luck.

"Yes," Kakashi said in a calm tone. He shoved his headband back down to let his Sharingan rest for a bit. "I copied every bit of it. Have you tried asking your, ah, tenant? Maybe he can sense Naruto's chakra."

"I will do that, good idea! Just a mo', I'll be right... here."

Well, that made sense. Kakashi called his clones back while Bee turned his attention inwards for a few seconds. He came out of it with a knowing look on his face.

"That way, yo" he said, immediately jumping away. Kakashi raced after him before the jinchuuriki's form got swallowed by the fog.

Neither of them noticed the white heads popping out from the ground a few minutes after their departure, nor did they see the maniacal grin that spread across their faces.

"Nnnnnaruto..." they hissed, disappearing underneath the ground without as much as disturbing the leaves on the plants.

* * *

With a single, fluid pounce the red-furred fox jumped on the windowsill, heading towards certain death. It hit the latch for the window a few times to open it and jumped out. Carla ran after the animal, trying to see if it stuck to the side of the building this time as well.

And it did. It sprinted down the side of the building, defying gravity and some other laws of physics in order to survive.

"Impossible," she said out loud to herself, staring at the multiple weaving tails trailing behind the red fox. A mutation of some kind?

"What aren't you telling us?" she asked of the patient as she turned around. But the kid was caught in a fevered dream and didn't respond, at least, not intelligently. He moaned and that brought Carla, the caring nurse, back to his needs. She checked his chart and noticed that he should have been given saridon instead of motrin. Intern screw-up, most likely.

"Well, maybe you're telling us, but we just can't understand it," she said to his non-responsive form before going out to fix his medication.

But the mystery of the red fox remained. This was the second, no, third time she saw a fox in his room. Those animals were common around here, but she had never heard of one sneaking into a room on the fourth floor of a hospital, or running _down_ a building without the end-result being the sound of a watermelon being dropped from a height. Foxes were too smart to jump out of a building to their certain deaths.

So, she reiterated to herself, what the hell. This had definitely not been a daydream, this was reality. A reality where foxes had apparently been crossed with geckos or octopuses.

True to her word, she checked on the kid a little while later to see if the fixed medication had improved his condition. But the flush on his cheeks and the soft, panting moans threw her into action. With quick, sure steps she alerted the attending resident of the kid's condition and he hurried after her. After an examination of the surgery wound and of course the chart the resident charted out a new course of action and Carla set to work, ordering the meds and cleaning the surgery scar.

The motion of the actions she had performed a thousand times before drove the thoughts of the fox out of her head, but when she spotted a redheaded kid (and made a mental note to ask Elliot why she suddenly ducked into a patient's room), the color brought it all back. But this redheaded kid wasn't the same visitor Naruto had gotten over the past days. This kid looked dangerous all the same, but Carla knew that was because of his puffed out cheeks, meaning that the kid could throw a temper tantrum at any time, right there in the waiting area. Oh hell no, not on her watch. She didn't like kids that much, but she knew how to shut them up.

After making sure that the kid would not dare to flip out inside a hospital ever again she went back to work.

"Naruto?" she asked, knocking on the door and entering at the same time. But the knocking sound was lost on the kid, his blue eyes hidden behind lidded eyelids and a cloudy gaze. At least he was conscious, but not all there at the moment. Some of the new medications must've brought him back, then.

" 'Spinosa," Naruto muttered, her appearance rousing him a bit. The flush on his cheeks still looked unhealthy though, and internally Carla hoped that JD would soon figure out what the kid was suffering from, because she simply did not know. Perhaps it was time to call in a specialist, the rate at which Naruto was deteriorating.

"Hey, Naruto. Do you want anything? Some water? I hope you didn't suffer through too many fever-nightmares, but you have no way of telling me."

It didn't matter that Naruto didn't speak English, he responded to the soothing tone with words in his own language, presumably about how he was feeling. But Carla already knew that: the kid felt like crap. Joints hurting, muddled mind, the whole works. Carla herself dreamed the same dream when she was running a fever: she was lost in a crowd of people, looking for her mother. While everybody spoke Spanish around her, they didn't understand her when she asked the faceless people where her mother was. The sounds ran together until it was an angry buzz in her ears. That buzz was actually one of the first signs that she was falling ill.

"Water, Naruto?" She prompted him, hoping that through the haze that word registered. It did not, because the kid looked blankly at her and then turned around, tucking the covers all the way up to his nose.

Just as Carla stepped up to give the kid some extra covers, since his fever sapped what remaining warmth he had left, her pager buzzed. With long-ingrained habit she checked it and immediately sped away, heading towards the guy coding three rooms down. He shouldn't be coding, he was fine when she was there ten minutes ago!

The code drove the thoughts about the kid and the mysterious fox even further from her mind. So nobody took notice when the red fox slunk back inside the room, gaining access to the tiny bathroom and hiding in there from prying nurses.

* * *

The kid's fevers steadied and actually gained a rhythm. One hour build-up, two hours of misery and approximately forty minutes recovery, followed by at least half an hour of lucidity before the build-up reared its head. It was the weirdest cycle JD had ever seen. Scratch that, it was the _first_ cycle JD had ever seen that could be pinpointed with such precision. As if his body was trying to start something, realized that it couldn't, so turned to feverish conditions before giving up and returning to healthy status.

"What do I do with you," JD said to himself as he made another mark on the chart, calculating how many cycles the boy had gone through. Each cycle weakened him, and the kid no longer responded to meds.

It had been six days since the kid was admitted, and although the scar on his belly no longer caused him much pain, he was still _here_. And that was bad, because although JD didn't like to think about it, hospitals were full of germs. MRSA was easier to contract in a hospital than out there, rolling in a haystack, for example.

That could be one of the reasons why the meds had stopped working, but the tests he ran didn't show that horrid infection in his blood, nor did he show any other signs, other than fever and general weakness. Certainly not enough to diagnose him properly, no matter how much Dr. Cox was on his tail.

Naruto chose that moment to speak, almost croak, the name he had repeated several times now. His red-headed friend hadn't shown up yet today, so it was logical to assume that Naruto missed his presence. Even if the foreign kid looked dangerous with those dark, sunken eyes, he at least offered a familiar face (and language) to the ill boy.

"Kurama," Naruto croaked, eyes fixated on a point behind JD. Almost involuntarily JD looked over his shoulder to locate the red-head, but instead met the fiery eyes of the biggest fox he had ever seen as it sauntered out of the bathroom. The next moment his mind dragged him over to the weird daydream he'd had before, inside the broken cage filled with water.

But this time the cage wasn't empty. If the fox inside the hospital room could be called big, the fox crouching behind the bars was positively ginormous. JD realized that his entire body was probably as big as a single claw, and that was enough to make anyone feel inadequate. He remembered that in fifth grade, they visited a museum of natural history and JD spent twenty minutes gaping at a single tooth of an allosaurus. He tried to imagine how big the dinosaur must've been, if it had teeth that could sink through his leg and come out the other side with inches to spare.

At the same time, the fox was tiny, his form wavering between the giant beast and the fun-sized fox. The voice it used was deep and commanding, whatever form it was in though.

"Your life is bleeding away, kit," it said in perfect English.

Naruto was inside the mental room as well, scuffing at the ground. He stood on top of the water, so really, he dipped the toes of his open-toed sandals into the water and kicked at the ripples he created.

"I know, but I can't do anything about it. My chakra is all kinds of messed up, no one in this place even resembles a shinobi and the fevers won't go away!"

"Of course your chakra is messed up, idiot. You're missing my share and your body is overcompensating. You're burning yourself up."

"Yeah, well, it's not like I can help that. I can't exactly stop myself from creating more chakra, now can I?"

"No," Kurama conceded, but he sounded impatient. "I'm going to give you some of my chakra so you can at least survive the coming day."

Naruto took on a Superman-pose, hands fisted at his side. "And after that? Are you going to abandon me as well?"

Kurama scoffed, his breath blowing back JD's gelled hair. Quite an accomplishment, actually. "I wish I could do that, kid. But I'm a tailed beast, and I'm not going to walk around for the rest of eternity looking like a toy version of my real body. I need to work with you to get the rest of my chakra back. Even if it means getting sealed back inside you."

Naruto looked down at his belly, where JD knew the big tattoo was. Sealed back inside? Did that mean that the foreign kid somehow carried a fox inside? He had fantasized about a lot of things, one more improbable than the last, but this was a new level of weird. But he still couldn't snap out of it. So he tried to do what he always did: become the vocal point of the fantasy.

"Well, the fevers are inexplicable, but I doubt that this 'chakra' has anything to do with it. I don't even know _where_ I heard that term, but since it came from a giant fox with nine tails, I think it's safe to say that I don't have to be concerned."

Both fox and human turned to JD with puzzled expressions on their faces. Naruto's stayed puzzled, though, while Kurama became plain mad.

"You again, human!" Kurama said with a snarl following soon after. He bared his (ohgodthosewere _huge_ ) teeth, which was frightening in both giant fox and fun-sized form. Foxes carried rabies, after all. And JD didn't want his daydream to turn into a dream where he got hurt or, worse, died.

"That's the third time he's here! You don't have a Sharingan, do you?"

Apparently the questioning look JD showed on his face was enough to prove that he had no idea what they were referring to.

"Not to my knowledge, no. I just daydream... a lot. And I have to say, this is one of the weirder ones. I mean, a giant _fox_? A cage inside a... a sewer?"

"I'm a tailed beast, medic," the fox growled, crouching low to the ground. JD saw that its ears were long and pointy, as if he was hung out to dry by his ears for a few years. One, three, nine tails spread out behind the fox, waving in the air. The small fox-version of this beast didn't have such ridiculous long ears, but he did have the nine tails as well.

"And I'm a doctor," JD shot back immediately. "Not a medic. Now, Naruto, you said you know what's wrong with you."

The kid crossed his arms and turned his back to the ever-transforming fox. "We," he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the fox, "got separated by an enemy. My chakra coils have been merged with his since I was a baby, so I'm not used to them being half-empty. And now my body is burning through my chakra to compensate for the loss."

JD shook his head, trying to make sense of that explanation. But even if he turned it over and examined it from a different direction, it was still a bunch of new-age words to him. Chakra, wasn't that energy of some sort, gained through meditation? Or was it yoga?

At any rate, he couldn't think of a medical solution to this problem. But the truth was, the kid was going to die if this kept up. So even if this was a daydream, even if he rationally knew that he was probably ignoring reality by inventing a giant... tailed beast living inside a cage, he asked: "How do I fix you?"

Naruto opened his mouth, closed it again, and glanced over his shoulder to urge the fox to weigh in on the discussion. The damn animal looked amused at the kid's panicky look. JD got the impression that Naruto wasn't the smartest kid around, if the rate at which he learned English was any indication.

"Don't call security on me," the fox said in a neutral tone. "And let me transfer some of my chakra into the kid. I know that in my current body I can't talk, and Naruto's only lucid for thirty minutes at most, if he ever truly is, so leave me alone for a couple of hours, and then we can talk again."

Naruto didn't seem pleased with the remark about his lucidity, and JD wondered if the kid even knew what kind of trouble he was in. In here he seemed healthy, but out there in the real world his body was limp and hurting, those blue eyes hidden behind a cloud of fever, the blankets kicked off because he was too hot to bear them.

"I'll do what I can," JD promised.

He blinked once and was back inside the hospital room. The relatively giant fox occupied the same spot, looking at him expectantly.

For a second he hesitated. His daydreams had always been incredibly vivid, but he could still tell the difference between reality and dream. This episode inside the sewer cage was something else, though. It had felt utterly real. At a hunch, he looked the fox in the eyes and asked: "Kurama?"

The moment he said it he felt silly. He should call security, animal control, a dog shelter, anyone to help him get rid of this (nine-tailed) beast inside the hospital.

But then the fox nodded and moved closer to Naruto. He actually _nodded_ , and wasn't that dandy? He should re-evaluate every moment spent with the blonde kid, because this was... plain weird. Not medical-miracle weird, this was Area 51 bizarre. How long had fox been able to understand human language? Was it a conspiracy? Or was the strange tale about chakra and separation true?

The fox hopped onto the bed and JD's instincts screamed at him to get rid of the animal, protect the patient from those wicked-looking fangs. But he felt rooted to the spot, much like he used to act during a train wreck-code. Life slipped past him as he watched the fox put both paws on the kid's belly and close its eyes in concentration. A red glow appeared around its paws, hovering around for a few seconds before sinking into the boy's stomach, straight through the damaged tattoo around his navel.

The crease lines of pain around Naruto's forehead eased and he breathed a little easier. JD kept on watching as the fox moved its paw, dragging it from Naruto's belly to his heart before moving onto specific points all across his body, from elbow to knee to neck. The fox (Kurama, JD thought to himself) was gentle, its long nails not scratching the tan skin, not even leaving a single mark.

JD was unsure how to react when the fox stopped and jumped down from the bed, sitting down in the corner of the room, intently watching JD. He realized that he was slightly in shock from having his worldview twisted in a direction he hadn't even thought about an hour ago.

"You're the real Kurama, aren't you?" he finally asked of the fox. It didn't respond.

Out of habit JD checked up on Naruto. The kid already looked better, and like he had noticed before, he breathed easier. The unhealthy shine of his cheeks had dimmed considerably and now he was just asleep instead of knocked out because of feverish nightmares.

Still unable to believe what had transpired JD wandered out of the room, leaving the fox behind. He needed to think, he needed to make sure that this wasn't some elaborate prank Turk set up. He needed to provoke Dr. Cox into ranting at him to make sure that the whole world hadn't gone absolutely mad.

* * *

After a few hours Kakashi felt better, his chakra more balanced, his Sharingan resting behind his forehead protector. If Obito showed up right now, he could tangle with him once more. He'd rather not, but he knew he had no choice.

He also knew that the place they were in appeared to be from another dimension entirely. The people spoke a language he had never heard before, none of them showed any sign of chakra-abilities and they drove these metal contraptions everywhere. Their entire infrastructure was built around it, and Kakashi mentally shook his head at that. One skilled Earth jutsu user was enough to disrupt their entire life and source of food and medicine.

Killer Bee was as surprised as he was at the strange architecture and amount of overweight people walking around town. They both realized that the jutsu had sent them somewhere else entirely, but Naruto's chakra was in this area, so they had to track him down. Somehow.

Kakashi regretted not having his nin-dogs around, but he himself was a decent tracker. Killer Bee seemed to have an inbuilt compass for demon-chakra as well, so between the two of them they managed to pinpoint Naruto's location to a large town.

The trouble was finding Naruto's exact whereabouts. Kakashi crouched down on the edge of a roof, overlooking a busy crossroad. Lights directed the flow of traffic and Kakashi marveled at that invention. It sure would solve disputes between drivers in Konoha's overflowing streets. Well, they would once again be overflowing once they'd finished rebuilding, now it was mostly tents and half-finished houses and shops.

If they could ever rebuild, that was. Obito was hell-bent on making the world his own, and Kakashi knew that Konoha would not fit into that world. Not the way Obito's twisted mind had warped his ideals. That could never include his home village. He'd probably raze it to the ground and use his Eye of the Moon Plan to make people think that Konoha had never existed. And wasn't that a sobering thought?

"You're his teacher, let me know, where do you think Naruto would go?" Killer Bee rapped. He stood next to Kakashi, but looked the other way, across the advertising billboard spanning the roof from left to right. He seemed engrossed in finding out what message the ad company was trying to convey with a tube of toothpaste and a tree side by side.

"Find the biggest explosion, he's probably there," Kakashi said more to himself than for Killer Bee's sake. The guy already knew, having trained Naruto as well.

Sadly, there were no explosions. There was just the ebb and flow of humans, going about their business. No matter the dimension, people still had to buy toilet paper. And toothpaste-trees.

"If he's not active and around, he's hurt," Kakashi continued. "Especially now that he's learned how to sense chakra. Otherwise he'd already be here." They both knew there was another alternative, but Naruto was far too stubborn to keel over from a simple highly illegal and dangerous dimension jump which bordered on impossible. Kyuubi wouldn't allow that.

"So we gotta find a hospital, or a medic tent," Killer Bee said. "Split up and meet back here in twenty."

Kakashi figured that was as good a plan as any and he leaped to the next rooftop, watching the pointy silhouette of Killer Bee disappear behind a building on the opposite side of the crossroad. The hunt for Naruto('s body) was on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [4] Shadow Clones
> 
> A/N: Like I said, I'm taking some liberties with the whole chakra and modern medicine thing. If any medical personnel is reading this, I do apologize for any errors and would love to be corrected. The next chapter is already the last one, but I hope you enjoyed this one!


	5. Chapter 5

Chris Turk was an uncomplicated man. He liked surgery, he liked beer, he liked watching his wife tear into whatever new intern tried to boss her around. What he didn't like was getting paged when he was about to fall asleep for what felt like the first time in forty hours.

And operating on the same kid he had under his knife six days ago was another tick in the do-not-like box. Especially not when the blonde kid JD had taken a shine to had a real risk of dying. The post-op fevers had not abated, and that should have been a clear sign.

Now his wound had developed dehiscence and it threatened to make the boy check out early if Turk wasn't on top of his game. He always was, of course, but still. These kinds of surgeries were hard on the body, and the kid had barely recovered from having his insides shoved back in. There were often complications from surgeries that severe. In rare cases the wound opened back up, but this time it had happened amazingly fast. Turk himself had inspected the healing process, and this shouldn't have happened. His wound had been closing nicely, but now he could see the pink flesh underneath the sutures.

They were lucky that they had discovered it in time, and now Turk was ready to make the first incision.

He tried not to think about the way those blue eyes had sparkled with life the last time he had seen the kid as he brought the scalpel down.

* * *

Kurama prowled inside the empty hospital room, itching to stand guard inside the operating room. With his paws he couldn't do much, but at least he could... well, he couldn't pump any more chakra into the boy, because that's what caused the complication in the first place.

At first, giving Naruto a bit of his chakra seemed to help. He slept better, the fever went down and his periods of lucidity increased.

The first four hours the black-haired doctor Kurama had spoken with kept on popping back in as if making sure he hadn't been dreaming the entire episode. Every time he seemed surprised at Kurama's presence, but he did a good job of keeping other people out.

The ex-giant fox used the opportunity to take a nap in the corner of the room, tails wrapped around himself. The need for sleep was overwhelming at times, and he slept longer than he should have. The next time he awoke, he was stiff, his entire underside was cold and Naruto looked like he had went for round five with Obito, only this time Naruto had his hands tied behind his back.

Naruto's breathing was labored amidst the buzzing TL-lights and that wheeze did _not_ sound good. Kurama stretched, padded up to the bed and jumped onto the mattress. Naruto didn't wake, so Kurama nudged him onto his back from his fetal position so he could access the boy's chakra pathways better. He repeated his earlier performance, letting his red chakra sink into Naruto's skin.

But this time the kid didn't appreciate it. He rarely did, whenever Kurama gave him some power. Apart from this last battle. He hoped he could go toe to toe with Madara again, because he owed it to the bastard to rip him apart with his teeth. Nobody humiliated the nine-tailed fox like Madara had, and even if the revenge was long in coming, eventually it _would_ come.

He did need a vessel of some kind, though, and Naruto should have responded to his chakra healing. His instincts should have woken him when a fifty pound fox jumped onto his bed. But with his ashen skin and quick, gasping breaths he didn't look ready to go back onto the battlefield at all. He looked like he wouldn't even survive the night.

So Kurama did what he knew worked: he gave him more chakra, more to balance the kid's coils and force a healing. And that's when it began to go really bad.

The fox scurried to the back wall when a nurse walked into the room. That in itself wasn't bad, but when she checked Naruto's chart, she frowned. Kurama secured himself a spot on the ceiling, using both his long claws and his chakra to keep a hold on the tiles. From his vantage point he saw her check the wound, and Kurama bit back a surprised yelp when the area around Naruto's navel was a mess of swollen pink flesh, barely kept together by thin strands of metal.

It looked like the boy's body got busy rejecting his insides with wild abandon. It reminded Kurama of the prey he once ate, loops of intestines hanging like natural jewelry around their bellies.

The nurse rushed out of the room and brought a doctor with her. They spoke in urgent tones, and before long wheeled Naruto out of the room. The kid had still been breathing, but it would be Kurama's luck if the boy died. He would never get out of this dimension, and he'd have to live out his life as a tiny fox, fighting for scraps of food.

That boy was not going to die on his watch. Not when he still had to use him, not when the kid had finally learned to respect and work with Kurama. They were a team, damnit, however screwed up they both were.

* * *

They neared the first hour of surgery mark when Turk took a mini-break to stretch his back. One of these days he would pop a joint so hard the whole limb would fall off.

But that would make surgery impossible, so he quickly got rid of that train of thought and focused back on the patient.

Naruto wasn't holding up well. They had decided upon general anesthesia because of the size of the surgery scar, but he had been weak already from the first surgery. Even his youth probably wouldn't save him, he was one of those kids that got unlucky.

Turk wasn't going to have any of that, but sometimes he couldn't battle fate. He feared that this may be one of those times, because the wound kept on swelling right back up, threatening to spill over and release more blood than a transfusion could replace. Turk was baffled at the way the wound acted, though. It seemed like Naruto's body was actively trying to reject something, but what?

He had a sinking feeling in his gut that they had left something inside the kid during the last surgery. It happened, it had happened before and it would happen again. That could cost a surgeon his career. Turk mentally told Naruto to survive this, so he could get better and prove his gut feeling wrong.

Naruto lay still, his eyes taped closed, unable to tell Turk what his body was trying to do. Even if he was awake, he barely spoke any English.

All of that fled from his thoughts when the kid began to crash and burn.

* * *

Foxes were by nature stealthy. They crept and leaped, targeting hares and mice, and silently padded up to birds. They had sharp hearing, strong hind legs and used unorthodox methods to lure prey closer.

Even so, it was hard for Kurama to make his way across a busy hospital unnoticed in pursuit of Naruto. He didn't like the way those nurses and doctors had talked to each other, worried frowns on their faces. The fact that they had to wheel him out of the room spoke volumes onto itself, because they were planning on treating the kid _right now_. And no matter how much Kurama liked his current freedom, he couldn't live without his power to back him up. It was hard enough to get used to only having half his chakra, the other half stolen by that damned Minato.

Kurama had some techniques in his arsenal regular foxes didn't, though. He could cling to walls and ceilings, reach ridiculously high speeds and walk on water. The last part wasn't useful right now, but he did walk on the ceiling, hid inside a supply closet and found a shortcut through a vent. There was a strange smell inside the vents, so he exited it a few rooms over and tried to gauge where they had taken Naruto.

The only thing people saw of him were his nine tails or his red eyes as he (disap)peered around the corner. Finally he found his way inside a room with no windows and bright lights. He hid in the shadows of the ceiling, but he might as well could have waltzed in there and casually walk up the wall. The people inside the room were so focused on the body stretched out on a raised metal table Kurama didn't have to use any of his stealthy abilities.

Naruto loved being the center of attention, but, Kurama guessed, not like this. Not with his literal guts on display.

And they were losing him. Kurama sensed that the kid's chakra depleted at a slow but steady rate, already heading into the dangerous territory, chakra levels where the pink-haired kunoichi would tell Naruto to head to bed right now. The nine-tailed fox had no idea why the kid was unraveling so quickly. He had been getting better, he could perform the Rasen-shuriken! It had failed him spectacularly, granted, but he was able to create one.

Now he had trouble breathing, and his face grew even more ashen. He was dying.

That was the cue for Kurama to finally _do something_ , something constructive which could save the boy's life. The kid owed him. Again.

Kurama ran down the wall, swiped a marker from a tray and headed back up onto the ceiling. With some trouble he got the cap off and accidentally let it clatter to the ground. One nurse looked around at the noise, but when she saw nothing untoward happening, she focused back on Naruto. Which was a good thing, because alarms began to sound. Kurama wrestled the marker into his mouth, imbued it with his chakra and started to draw.

* * *

Exactly like Turk had feared, they were losing him. His body was too weak from the previous surgery, the fevers had wrecked his body and the blood loss amped it all up. His heart began to give, and that alarm was the scariest sound of all.

For one brief moment Naruto seemed okay, the alarms stopped and Turk kept on working. He did _not_ want to tell JD that his precious project had died under Turk's hands. And it would be cool if the kid survived as well.

Of course, that's when the kid went down. His heart went into v-fib, so Turk immediately followed proper procedure to restart the heart. After two zaps with the AED the kid came back online, but not for long. Turk had picked up his scalpel to cut away the dead flesh when the alarms sounded throughout the OR.

"Oh no, you're not," Turk said, making another grab for the AED.

He heard a strange sound from somewhere above him, but he focused on returning the heartbeat back to normal. When the little ups and downs calmed down on the screen, Turk took the liberty to look up. He had a bit of trouble looking past the bright lights, but as his eyes adjusted he could make out a scene which was probably unique in a hospital

Perched on the ceiling was a giant fox. It sat on its haunches as if was absolutely normal for a canine to be on the ceiling with nothing visible holding it up. Surrounding it lay a glowing red spiral with scribbles heading outwards from the edge in a structured pattern, a bit like a spider-web. The fox stared intently at Naruto, head tilted upwards to keep an eye on things. It yipped, and Turk realized that that was the sound he heard before.

He bit the inside of his cheek to verify that this wasn't a daydream, but the sting of pain was real.

But even with the fox somehow sitting on the ceiling, Naruto was busy dying on the table. Who knew what kinds of germs foxes carried with them? Rabies could be the least of their problems. Even if the animal was upside-down, they had to get rid of it.

Turk jerked his head towards the phone. "Call animal control."

"Yeah, and the Ghostbusters," an intern added, staring at the fox. Turk glanced upwards. The fox lifted a paw, let a red glow grow around it and slammed it down on the markings. After that, things happened fast.

The fox dissolved into red energy, which lanced downwards and struck Naruto in the abdomen, exactly where they were busy repairing him. It occurred to Turk that this is what had happened before, why Naruto had ended up in Sacred Heart in the first place. That fox had burst out of him, somehow.

Naruto went into his third bout of v-fib, but this time he got out of it himself. Even with the amount of drugs and general anesthesia in his system he managed to twitch, shudder and finally jerked as the glowing red lines of his tattoo faded and showed an unbroken tattoo.

Before Turk's eyes the wound closed, the sutures popping out like staples in an office fight. Within ten seconds there was no sign that there had even been a wound, not even a scar to show off to friends. Twenty seconds passed, during which Turk guessed that the fox was busy rearranging Naruto's insides. His pale face flooded with blood once more and whatever the fox had been, he fixed the boy up better than a crack team of surgeons could have done.

And then the kid burst into flames.

* * *

The second thing he felt was his lungs inflating by themselves, making his head a little clearer and the world a little brighter. The first thing was, as usual, the pain. The third thing was Kurama's presence back inside his head, his whole self, not just his voice.

"Welcome back," Naruto said to heap of fox on the watery floor, leaning against the remains of the cage and crossing his arms. Kurama awoke, the whites of his eyes visible in the dim light. His pupils were tiny, his eyes wide. The fox rearranged himself into a more dignified position than the sprawl he had landed in.

"You almost died, idiot," Kurama said by way of greeting. "Actually, you did die. Twice." He smirked. "For all your tough talk, you _need_ me out there in the real world."

Naruto didn't know whether to huff and deny that, as he would have done before, or semi-agree. If he hadn't inherited the fox, he probably would be dead by now, but then again, he wouldn't have such a big target on his back like he did now. The Akatsuki sure wouldn't have been interested in him.

"I'm glad you're back though," Naruto finally decided to say, ignoring the remark. "Why didn't you do this sooner?"

"Because," Kurama said, and stopped. He seemed uncomfortable, too small for his skin, one tail crooked by his side instead of waving around with the other eight. "I had to sacrifice myself."

Naruto righted his spine at that remark and let his arms drop to his side. "Oh," he said, not sure what to say to that. "Uh, thanks?"

"You better damn well be thankful, kid. I paid for this sealing with my tail. The Shinigami took it in return for my captivity."

"So why didn't you let me die?" Naruto asked, stepping closer to Kurama. "Also, should I start calling you eight-tails now?"

Kurama swiped at Naruto with his paw, deliberately missing, but the message was clear. "Get back out there, boy, and kill Madara."

Naruto snapped off a salute. "Yes, boss!"

The fourth thing he noticed was that he had something stuck in his throat. It didn't hurt, but he couldn't talk. He lay flat on his back, Kurama's chakra surging through him.

Something was stuck on his eyelids and he pawed at it, tearing the tape and a few loose eyelashes off. When he opened his eyes, he looked directly into bright lights. He winced as he took a dozen seconds to adjust, but then he was able to look around. Six people surrounded him, in varying degrees of surprise. One guy fled the room even as Naruto watched, the others were rooted to the spot. Yeah, this world definitely wasn't used to shinobi. A glowing guy with six magatama on his body might raise eyebrows, but at least the civilians in Konoha didn't flee at the first sight of him.

He still couldn't talk, though, so he sat up and that dislodged whatever was inside him. He coughed and the machine inflated his lungs again, messing up his internal rhythm. He grabbed at his mouth and pulled out what felt like a ridiculously long tube. He gagged as it passed his throat but finally he had it out. For a moment he felt dizzy, but then Kurama's chakra kicked in, healed the cuts on his tongue and the next breath brought enough oxygen for him to bring the world back into focus.

"Yo," he said, or tried to say, because his throat was sore and he coughed a few more times before he tried the greeting again. It still wasn't smooth, but it was smooth enough.

The five people surrounding the... table he sat on were all dressed in green, wearing surgical masks in front of their mouths and caps on their heads. Naruto realized that underneath the bloodied plastic blanket covering his lap he wore his hospital gown, but that one was covered with drops of blood as well. And of course, underneath that he was naked. Always think underneath the underneath, Kakashi had said, but he probably hadn't meant a situation where Naruto woke up inside an operating room, where apparently he had been on the verge of death.

Naruto tried to preserve a bit of his dignity as he got off the table, but utterly failed when his gown snagged on the metal wheelie tray. Good thing he had Kurama's golden chakra glow surrounding him. He ripped off a piece of the plastic green blanket and tied it around his waist underneath the hospital robe. There, that should tide him over for now.

So, he and Kurama were united once more, but he still had one more problem: how did he get home?

Also, how did one communicate clearly that one required pants to do so?

* * *

They finally pinpointed where Naruto was when his chakra flared up so high with demonic energy even a genin could feel the killing intent of it. They were off by about two miles, but buildings could as easily be used as jumping-off points as tree branches, so Kakashi made good progress across town.

The building Naruto was in was, as they had theorized, a hospital. It stood on the edge of town, bustling with vehicles with flashing lights and people walking in and out all the time. Killer Bee showed up ten seconds after Kakashi. Because they were proper shinobi they hid themselves amongst some shrubbery outside the hospital.

"Naruto's in there, but you'll cause a panic if you go into that hospital looking like that," Kakashi summed up. Killer Bee looked over his shoulder at the giant sword strapped to his back and the other pointy bits he carried around with him all day. He opened his mouth as if he was going to protest, but common sense won out.

Kakashi had seen that nobody in this world used chakra or even carried weapons. Not ones like Samehada, at least. Whatever police force they had, they would be alerted immediately if a guy with a six-foot sword walked up to the reception in search of a teenage boy. Kakashi knew that he looked weird by this society's standards as well, but hopefully he would be passed off as 'quirky' and not 'trained killer since six years old'.

"I'll find him," Kakashi assured Killer Bee.

"You do that, I'll wait out here, unless something's not in the clear," Killer Bee rapped back. "Give a yell, I'll come swinging, and slay whatever's killing."

"Agreed," Kakashi said before jumping out of the bushes. Casually he tucked his kunai deeper into his sleeves, dug into a pocket of his Jounin vest and got an old and battered photograph out. He took a deep breath before he entered the building. He'd spent too much time already inside hospitals, whether it was waiting for someone to survive a surgery or chakra exhaustion laying him flat for weeks upon end. And even if this was a hospital in another dimension, places of healing were largely the same. People died in these buildings.

The waiting area wasn't busy, with a few people with minor injuries filling out forms and trying not to bleed on them. Someone argued at the reception desk and Kakashi neatly got in line behind the man, trying to gauge where Naruto's chakra was coming from. If push came to shove he wouldn't hesitate to make a break for it and find the kid himself, but it'd be easier if he didn't have angry hospital staff on his heels.

Naruto's chakra was located in the left wing somewhere, the demon killing intent obvious.

The man was done ranting. The older nurse with curly black hair gave the man a perfect unimpressed look, silently handed him a clipboard and gestured towards a seat. She said a few calm words and the man left, head hanging.

Kakashi stepped forward and he could see her try to gauge his readiness to make a scene. Kakashi smiled at her and tried to convey in as simple words as possible what he came here for.

"Hello," he began, and immediately she frowned at the, to her, strange sounding language. "I'm looking for Naruto," Kakashi continued, clearly enunciating his words. He put the battered photograph on the reception desk and tapped on Naruto's younger but unmistakable face. "Naruto," he repeated. The nurse took a long look at the photograph, another at Kakashi's masked face before she grabbed the telephone.

She tried to ask him questions, but he didn't understand a word she was saying. Finally she gave up and talked into the telephone for a few seconds in a curt tone before she hung up.

"Naruto," she confirmed, also tapping the photograph. She looked at the other occupants of the picture, a young Sakura and Sasuke, with a smiling Kakashi bending over them, hands on their heads. They had been so small back then, so unaware of the world around them. Now Naruto was busy fighting Kakashi's former teammate (or, he had been, before the accidental transport), he and the Kyuubi up against a full-fledged demon, a battle on a scale Kakashi thought he'd never witness.

The nurse pointed at a chair in the waiting area and held up three fingers, pointing at the clock with her other hand. Apparently she wanted him to wait for a bit. Kakashi complied and after a minute or two a man in his late twenties showed up. He headed towards Kakashi and the shinobi got up. The young man extended his hand and Kakashi shook it, making sure that the hidden kunai in his sleeves didn't slide out. The young man had dark hair and looked like he could use a couple of hours of sleep, but he held himself confidently as he gestured for Kakashi to follow him.

As they walked the hallways of the hospital, the young man (a healer, Kakashi presumed) elaborately introduced himself as Doctor Dorian. Kakashi introduced himself as well and was happy to notice that Naruto's demonic chakra grew stronger the further they walked into the bowels of this place. Doctor Dorian led them into an empty office and invited Kakashi to sit down.

"Naruto..." Doctor Dorian began, and hesitated. He reached into the desk drawer, got out paper and a pencil and started explaining what had happened to Kakashi's student. Apparently he had been admitted with a severe wound in his lower abdomen, complications had arisen and someone named 'Kurama' had visited him often. That one threw Kakashi for a loop. He didn't know anybody by that name, and by the sound of it it wasn't a random citizen visiting ill children to cheer them up.

Doctor Dorian focused for some time on Kurama, but Kakashi had no idea what the sketch of a red-haired kid was supposed to represent. The only one he could think of with that kind of color hair was Gaara, but then his eyes would be surrounded by black, plus the commander was back home, fighting the good fight.

Naruto's chakra pulsed and Kakashi became eager to see his student for himself. Killer Bee wouldn't wait outside for much longer, either, he surmised. Kakashi got up and pointed at the direction where Naruto's chakra originated from. Doctor Dorian seemed to understand, because he quickly sketched medical equipment, with Naruto lying in the middle, surgeons bending over him.

So they were operating on his student? He definitely had to be present for that, even if he had to subdue the kid should the Kyuubi be released by the trauma.

Doctor Dorian showed him the way and soon only a glass wall separated them from the operating room.

Which was a good thing, because the room was in utter chaos. Smoke curled down from the ceiling, where Kakashi could make out softly glowing runes burnt into the tiles. A couple of trays of instruments were overturned, the contents scattered across the ground. Five people stood (some cowered) against the back wall, their gloves still bloody and with wide-eyed expressions on their faces.

Naruto sat on the metal table, his demon cloak covering him. He had wide eyes, taking in the room around him. He focused on the healers at the back wall, but Kakashi noticed that he wasn't letting go of the demon cloak. Judging by the way Naruto sat on the metal table, the healers had been busy operating on his student when they ran afoul of the Kyuubi's healing helping hand.

Doctor Dorian uttered some words, maybe an expletive, but his tone was one of utter surprise. Kakashi's theory that they were far removed from their own world only cemented itself even more into his brain.

As he watched, his student slid from the table onto steady legs. His hospital gown snagged on something and Naruto took a few seconds to free himself. He kept on eying the people but his head swiveled around awfully quick when Kakashi knocked twice on the glass.

Naruto's huge grin was infectious and Kakashi smiled back at the kid. He finally had his student back, and now they could go on with their mission to rid their world of its ultimate evils: his former teammate and a guy who should never have returned in the first place.

But first, they had to get Naruto some clothes, Kakashi thought as he stepped into the room.

* * *

The golden fire didn't seem to consume the patient, it was a constant glow shaped into a larger-than-life costume with black marks running across the kid's chest, arms and legs. The glow made his blonde hair pointier and it followed the shape of the hospital gown, lengthening it until it swept an inch from the floor, the jagged edged giving it a dangerous look.

JD had daydreamed about a lot already, but he knew this was something he never would've imagined. The Kakashi-guy had already been weird, as was the fox, but those were things JD could at least place. The glowing figure was something out of a bad sci-fi movie, complete with fake special effects.

But Naruto was still Naruto, it seemed, because the kid launched himself at Kakashi and bumped fists with the older man, his white teeth bared in a huge grin. Naruto spoke a mile a minute, gesturing towards JD and Turk, pointing at the metal table as he talked like JD hadn't heard him do before. Apparently Kakashi was someone Naruto trusted, because by the sounds of it the guy got treated to the entire story through a hoarse voice which smoothed out the more the kid talked.

Two more nurses and the anesthetist used the distraction to flee the room, leaving JD, Turk and Dr. Wen behind with the strange duo.

Kakashi finally interrupted Naruto and put a hand on his shoulder, making 'slow down' motions with his other hand. Naruto blew out a breath and the glow disappeared as if a switch had been flicked. The room became a lot darker, what with several lights having been blown away or out thanks to the weird energy Naruto had put out.

"Dude!" Turk yelled when he spotted JD. "Let's move!"

But JD refused to bail. He had treated the kid, he had conversed with a giant fox, he was going to ride this tale out until his curiosity was satisfied.

"Naruto?" he asked, and became the center of attention from both eccentric guys. He desperately wanted to know what was going on, but he had no idea how he could phrase it so Naruto with his limited grasp of the English language could understand him.

"Are you alright?" he simply asked, gesturing towards the surgical site, where there should be a wound. But the skin was smooth, the sutures gone. Naruto obligingly lifted his hospital gown to show that the tattoo was back, unbroken by scars.

"What happened to Kurama?" JD continued. He had to rephrase it into "Where Kurama?" to make Naruto understand it. The kid once again pointed at his tattoo, and before JD realized what was going on he was back inside the damp room, the cage that wasn't a proper cage. The giant fox lounged behind the broken bars, and this time it remained giant. It looked at JD with contempt, snorted once and closed its eyes.

"The kid nearly died," the fox accused, talking without moving its mouth. "And you didn't check up with him often enough."

The words were familiar, even if they came from a mythical beast. Family of patients sometimes expected that the doctor remained with the patient indefinitely until the patient was better. If they didn't do that, they would get accused of neglecting the patient. Nurses, interns, they all got the same accusations. So JD had a ready response, but Naruto beat him to it.

"If you hadn't tried to force your chakra down my throat, this wouldn't have happened!"

Naruto was dressed in the orange clothes and JD wondered how the kid managed to manipulate his mental representation. JD himself wore the same scrubs he wore today.

"I saved your sorry life. Again," Kurama reminded the boy. Naruto huffed and crossed his arms.

"I already thanked you. But you're not a healer, and that chakra you gave me only made me reject it. Which wouldn't have been so bad, if it hadn't gotten rejected _through the seal_!"

The seal... the tattoo... things clicked inside JD's mind. The sudden deterioration, the wound dehiscence, it was because the fox had tried to push that glowing energy into Naruto. And JD had let it happen without objection, he'd even helped by keeping people out of the room. Well, wasn't that grand.

Naruto and Kurama glowered at each other before they both turned their heads and JD got booted unceremoniously out of their spat, making him dizzy for a second before he reoriented himself inside his real body.

Just like before, the whole exchange couldn't have taken more than a few seconds, even if inside the cage more time had elapsed. Naruto looked in the same direction he had snapped to inside the cage. He hissed one word and Kakashi righted his spine and focused.

"Zetsu."

Both Naruto and Kakashi sprinted towards the door so fast JD had trouble following them with his eyes.

With Turk yelling "Hey!" after them they took off down the hallway, JD in tow. He could hear Turk following them. The strange duo raced inside a patients room on the first floor, opened the window and leaped out without any regard for their safety. They landed unharmed on the ground though.

They stood in the parking lot of the hospital, outside of the entrance. People were already busy running away from the scene, because two other dangerous-looking guys were circling each other. One of them looked like a Ken doll, completely naked but with no visible genitalia. And he was white, not skin-color white but lab coat-white. He had green hair and showed a toothy grin. The guy he circled held an impractically huge sword in his hands. More swords dangled off his muscled body, accentuated with red hilts. The guy had slicked-back blonde hair and wore sunglasses.

Naruto and Kakashi dashed up to the pair and joined sword-guy. They talked in quick words as they assumed a position like they were ready to rumble. Ken-doll smirked and moved forward, fingers tangling together and then there were three of them, somehow. All three of them sprung towards someone and got in a fight. JD had trouble keeping up what was happening exactly, people were screaming as they ran from the vicious battle taking place right there in the parking lot.

Sword-guy enthusiastically swung his sword around, the golden glow around Naruto returned and Kakashi lifted the headband covering his eye, revealing a scar and another eye. It looked a bit like the ninja fight JD had envisioned once, but this time it was real, and a lot more dangerous.

Impossible things happened right then, among them more Naruto's appearing, lightning held in Kakashi's hands and huge tentacles growing out of sword-guy's arms. The Ken-dolls tried to impale Kakashi with their hands, attempted to trap sword-guy inside their bodies, resembling a Venus fly trap for a second, but sword-guy dodged the attack.

Something glowing on the rooftop caught JD's attention. Naruto stood on the rooftop, and something blue grew in his right hand. When it got big enough, he raised it above his head and it expanded, turning into a rotating disk of death. A high-pitched whine came from it, much like wind whistling between narrow buildings on a stormy day.

He held it there for ten, maybe twenty seconds before he spotted an opportunity and leaped into the air, claiming an impossible height before turning his attack downwards. JD had trouble spotting where Naruto was, because the kid used the glare of the sun to his advantage.

The Ken-doll didn't see it coming. Maybe he was blinded by the sun as well, but the end result was that Naruto threw the disk side-ways at the last second before he hit the ground, rolling on his shoulder. The power behind the disk carried the Ken-doll into the air and then the disk expanded exponentially, taking tree branches and a small portion of the ground with it. In the middle of it all there was a horrible sound of pain before it cut out unexpectedly, and the two other Ken-dolls poofed out of existence in small puffs of clouds.

When the sound, light and wind died down there was nothing left of the Ken-doll. Sword-guy put the giant sword back on his back and Kakashi tugged his headband down, slipping the knife in his right hand back into his left sleeve. Wait, had that been there the whole time? Even when he sat in the office with JD?

JD yelped when Turk pinched his arm hard enough to bruise.

"No, you're not daydreaming either," Turk explained himself. "What in the hell was that about? Who were those guys?"

"I don't know," JD said, already turning towards the door, "but I bet that Naruto will want his stuff back. And that's inside his room. Come on!"

Together they sprinted towards Naruto's room, and sure enough Naruto crouched in front of his bedside table. He held his jacket up for inspection, but their line of sight got blocked by sword-guy. Up close JD spotted the tattoos on the guy's cheek and upper arm. He was tall, his long white scarf slightly dirty from the no-holds barred fight he'd participated in.

Naruto spoke a few words and reluctantly sword-guy stepped back to grant JD and Turk entrance. Kakashi eyed them but did nothing.

JD found it hard to look at Naruto the same way. The kid had basically killed a guy. No, he hadn't only killed him, he had obliterated him. The Ken-doll had looked dangerous, but so did sword-guy. But Naruto had been kind, his laugh genuine, and he had a certain trustworthiness around him which drew JD in. The kid wasn't a true killer, JD had been around enough lying douchebags to know the kind. Maybe this had been in self-defense, maybe Ken-doll had been the one to give him the wounds in the first place.

He sincerely hoped so, because Naruto being a good guy would save him from months of guilt that JD had helped nurse a crazed, super powered murder machine back to health.

"What's up, Doran," Naruto said as he got up from his crouch, his meager possessions in his hands. He headed towards the bathroom to get changed, but before he did, he turned to sword-guy.

"Doran, Killer Bee. Bee, Doran," he said before he disappeared inside the bathroom and shut the door.

Great, sword-guy was _actually_ called 'Killer'. Hello, guilt.

To his surprise Killer Bee began to sing... No, he began to rap. He rapped for a long while before ending in a questioning tone. JD had no idea what the guy had been talking about, so he slowly shook his head. That appeared to be the right answer, because Killer Bee laughed and clapped JD on the back so hard he stumbled forwards a few steps, catching himself on the wall.

Turk tried to talk with the man, but they couldn't even say 'Hello' without either party blanking out.

Naruto didn't take long changing, and when he stepped out of the bathroom JD had a feeling that the kid was once again whole. He had the same headband as Kakashi, albeit his had a black cloth. His mended orange clothes screamed 'look at me!', but with an arsenal like he had, he probably had gained the right to wear colors like that in public. There was confidence in his blue eyes and JD felt glad that he hadn't died on the operating table. They would have robbed the world of somebody who could get things done. Impossible things, but JD had a feeling the kid wasn't of this world.

The giant fox inside Naruto's mind, the devastating disc attack, it all led to the conclusion that Naruto was either an alien or a superhero from another dimension. And this time, JD wasn't dreaming that.

Naruto turned to Turk and JD and bowed, hands clasped in front of him.

"Thank you," he simply said. "Thank you, nurse Espinosa," he continued. JD would be sure to pass that one on.

He heard police sirens in the distance and knew that these guys had to go, get back to either their mother ship or their own dimension.

"Go, Naruto, Kakashi, Killer Bee," Turk said, pointing at the window. "Go, go, go!"

But they didn't move apart from Kakashi, who tangled his fingers together in a set pattern. Killer Bee pushed JD and Turk backwards, towards the door of the room. The door flew open when Doctor Kelso entered. Out of instinct both JD and Turk's arms shot out to stop the old man. The security guard stood behind Doctor Kelso, the phone glued to his ears to give status updates to the police.

Wind began to whip inside the room as Kakashi continued his finger patterns. JD saw that he had shoved his headband back up and the guy had one red eye, which gleamed as he twisted his fingers.

"What in the world?" Doctor Kelso asked in a demanding tone, then fell silent as the trio winked out of existence in front of his eyes, Naruto giving one last wave.

The sound of silence cloyed the air and JD heard Lennart gasp in belated surprise.

"Was that the uninsured kid?" Doctor Kelso snapped. JD nodded as Doctor Kelso grumbled. That was one bill the hospital would never get paid, unless somehow they sent whatever currency they used on Jupiter through a dimension portal.

"Moving on, why aren't you using Plomax on Mister Nelson?" Doctor Kelso asked, abruptly turning away from the empty room.

Trust the Chief of Medicine to basically ignore what had just happened in his parking lot and get on with business. Medicine was a field where miracles happened, where kids could carry around foxes inside mental cages, and he'd still get the same treatment as an unremarkable tenth-grader.

But JD knew it'd be a long while before he could 'move on', forget about Naruto and pretend that he hadn't treated a potential killer. One with blue and red eyes, with a limited vocabulary but such fiery will he had won everyone over in the end.

One who would hopefully fight the good fight and come out on top.

**The End**

 

**Author's Note:**

> In case any people only used to the dubbed episodes are reading this, here be a translation:
> 
> [1] Tailed Beast Ball


End file.
